Firsting, lasting, haunting: the carved stone partial monuments of California’s civic landscapes

World Archaeology · 2026-01-09

<i>Indigenous Currencies: Leaving Some for the Rest in</i> <i>the Digital Age</i> <b>Ashley Cordes</b>. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 2025. 226 pp. 22 black & white illustrations. ISBN: 9780262552530. $35.00 (paper)

Beads (Ottawa. Online)/Beads · 2025-12-22

Indigenizing Archaeology: Putting Theory into Practice ed. by Emily C. Van Alst and Carlton Shield Chief Gover (review)

Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2025-09-01

12. Rethinking “Long-Term”: Time Immemorial and Archaeology in an Era of Self-Dealing and Sacrilegious Destruction

Berghahn Books · 2024-01-23 · 1 citations

12. Rethinking “Long-Term”: Time Immemorial and Archaeology in an Era of Self-Dealing and Sacrilegious Destruction was published in Inclusion, Transformation, and Humility in North American Archaeology on page 203.

<i>Town Destroyer</i>, by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, Bullfrog Films

The Public Historian · 2024-02-01

Review| February 01 2024 Town Destroyer, by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, Bullfrog Films Town Destroyer. Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, Writers, Directors, and Producers; Peggy Berryhill, Executive Producer. Bullfrog Films, 2022. 53 minutes. Tsim D. Schneider Tsim D. Schneider University of California, Santa Cruz Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2024) 46 (1): 178–181. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2024.46.1.178 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tsim D. Schneider; Town Destroyer, by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, Bullfrog Films. The Public Historian 1 February 2024; 46 (1): 178–181. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2024.46.1.178 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search Town Destroyer, written and directed by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, documents the 2019 effort to remove New Deal-era murals adorning the walls of George Washington High School in San Francisco, California. Commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, Victor Arnautoff painted the thirteen-panel mural titled "The Life of Washington" in 1936. The murals present different moments in the life of George Washington, and unlike school textbooks of the time, Arnautoff chose to depict some of the more troubling attributes of Washington's career. This includes profiting from the ownership and labor of enslaved Africans and ordering the annihilation of Haudenosaunee people during the American Revolution. Hanodaga:yas (Town Destroyer) is the name Seneca people use for George Washington, and the mural's depiction of a dead Native American lying face down in the dirt reflects that violent history. Viewing the "dead Indian" as symbolic of institutionalized white supremacy and valorizing Native American... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: <i>Alliance Rises in the West: Labor, Race, and Solidarity in Industrial California</i>, by Charlotte K. Sunseri

California History · 2022-01-01

As a kid attending primary school in California, I constructed a model of Mission San Diego. My fourth-grade class also learned about the gold rush, and then we visited the California State Railroad Museum, where an oversized painting of the 1869 “last spike” ceremony still hangs, accompanied by an interpretive panel to aid museumgoers in identifying all the prominent white men who attended the historic event. Native American and Chinese laborers also appear in the painting, but they are unnamed and watch passively from the shadows, anonymous accessories to American history. Unfortunately, my experience as a student is not unique, and this compartmentalized view of California history endures, with increasing focus on chunks of time that feature more and more European and American settlers up to the present day. “History is of course more complex than one simple narrative,” Charlotte Sunseri writes, and what I enjoy about Alliance Rises in the West are the intimate glimpses of Chinese immigrants and Indigenous Kutzadika’a (Paiute) people at home in the late-nineteenth century company town of Mono Mills, California (xix). Theirs are lives not normally featured in museum paintings or in the lesson plans of fourth-grade classrooms. However, through innovative archaeological and archival research, Sunseri crafts a compelling story of making do—how Chinese and Native peoples confronted violence, racism, and alienation with persistence, community formation, and collective action.Alliance Rises in the West is the latest addition to the University of Nebraska Press’s Historical Archaeology of the American West series. The book consists of five chapters, including a brief introduction to the research project, an overview of the Mono Mills company town and Bodie (chapter 1), a theoretical discussion of laborers’ identities in company towns (chapter 2), an introduction to the unique and converging histories of Chinese and Native people who lived and worked at Mono Mills (chapter 3), and an in-depth look at household archaeology at Mono Mills and its relevance to the study of working-class solidarity (chapter 4). Chapter 5 draws from archaeological finds, oral histories, and documents (e.g., newspaper advertisements, mail-order catalogs, letters, and voting records) to explore consumer behavior, labor organizing, political action, and acts of sabotage as reflections of class-based collective struggles over compensation and the appropriation of labor. Although some of the more technical visuals, such as ground-penetrating radar “slice” maps, could have benefited from additional explanation, the book is liberally peppered with imagery—including field maps, artifact photos, and several stunning historical photographs—that effectively “people” the past and add rich texture to our knowledge of this seemingly remote place and time.A core contribution of this work is its argument that, while seemingly short, the thirty-seven-year history of Mono Mills represents an important window onto the agency of immigrant and Indigenous peoples who “survived exclusion and fought back” (32). In this sense, Sunseri’s research adds to a rich scholarly conversation that explores the daily lives and resilience of peoples who endured colonialism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century California (e.g., research by Kent Lightfoot and collaborators on the Native Alaskan village site at Fort Ross). The author pays close attention to interethnic coalition building—how people from different ethnic backgrounds embraced a shared working-class identity and, through this practice, found common ground and a platform for resistance. Chinese and Kutzadika’a wage-earners practiced their cultures and manipulated racialized categories to build common identities and circumvent company othering that was designed to minimize their organizing. In doing so, they maintained traditions, gained legal redress, and developed “community-affirming ideologies to promote survival in the context of capitalism” (52). Sunseri’s book leaves some intriguing questions unanswered, however. In comparison to Fort Ross, where Native Alaskan men and Native Californian women cohabitated in shared households between 1812 and 1841, one wonders if there were limits to the shared working-class identity at Mono Mills. Did Native American, Chinese, and Basque people ever live together or marry in addition to bartering, blending material cultures, and sharing foods, or did a cabin’s front door represent a more formidable boundary between public and private lives?Alliance Rises in the West also carefully situates Native experiences of discrimination and devaluation at Mono Mills within a longer history of sustained colonialism, genocide, assimilation, and the dispossession of traditional homelands, as well as Native resistance, survival, and persistence. Although some Native people adopted a life along the “river of money,” Sunseri shows that they did so in deliberate and culturally specific ways (51). For example, the author explores the 1889 Ghost Dance and the Northern Paiute ethic of hard work instilled through the teachings of Wovoka to evaluate why some Kutzadika’a people took jobs in capitalist settings. Sunseri describes how Native families incorporated Mono Mills into a traditional settlement pattern and rotated seasonally between the company town and different locales throughout a broader homeland, as well as how Native women incorporated glass beads into their baskets to both earn income and sustain traditional weaving traditions. Members of the Native community at Mono Mills gained access to introduced foods and new consumer goods while continuing to collect, trade, and consume pine nuts. They also crafted sharp cutting implements from discarded glass bottles for use alongside obsidian tools and other traditional materials “too important to stop using” (92).This is an approachable and concise study that is certain to inform the work of educators and researchers with interests in such topics as class, capitalism, and labor movements, as well as race and racialization during the Gilded Age. For students, the book represents an excellent case study in gathering and comparing multiple forms of evidence in archaeological research. Alliance Rises in the West is recommended reading for historical archaeologists, particularly specialists in California and elsewhere investigating the experiences and agency of minoritized ethnic groups combating and rebuffing discrimination and violence during California’s long history of missionary, mercantile, and settler colonialism. This reviewer has already integrated some of Sunseri’s findings on cross-cultural alliance building at Mono Mills into a course unit on “The Archaeology of Inequality and the Contemporary Past.”Rounding out the analysis, Sunseri connects the scholarship to current events. This is where archaeology—a discipline frequently misunderstood as stuck in the past—finds added relevance in public-facing discussions of immigration history, Indigenous knowledge and conservation efforts, and natural resources policy and management. “To confront inequalities of today,” Sunseri writes, we “must consider the ways in which past behaviors have perpetuated prejudice, beliefs, and policies and must also look for solutions in the historic past” (124).

Compositional analysis of compound drawn white glass beads from colonial California:

Universitaire Pers Leuven eBooks · 2022-10-08 · 1 citations

Lee M. Panich, Laure Dussubieux, Tsim D. Schneider, Christopher Canzonieri, Irenne Zwierlein, Christopher Zimmer, Michelle Zimmer, Compositional analysis of compound drawn white glass beads from colonial California:, The Elemental Analysis of Glass Beads, pp. 119-136

Archaeology and Social Justice in Native America

American Antiquity · 2022 · 47 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

Over the past 20 years, collaboration has become an essential aspect of archaeological practice in North America. In paying increased attention to the voices of descendant and local communities, archaeologists have become aware of the persistent injustices these often marginalized groups face. Building on growing calls for a responsive and engaged cultural heritage praxis, this forum article brings together a group of Native and non-Native scholars working at the nexus of history, ethnography, archaeology, and law in order to grapple with the role of archaeology in advancing social justice. Contributors to this article touch on a diverse range of critical issues facing Indigenous communities in the United States, including heritage law, decolonization, foodways, community-based participatory research, and pedagogy. Uniting these commentaries is a shared emphasis on research practices that promote Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. In drawing these case studies together, we articulate a sovereignty-based model of social justice that facilitates Indigenous control over cultural heritage in ways that address their contemporary needs and goals.

Archaeology and Social Justice in Native America – CORRIGENDUM

American Antiquity · 2022-10-01 · 2 citations

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Conclusion

University Press of Florida eBooks · 2022-02-15 · 3 citations

This concluding chapter identifies and discusses common themes woven throughout the volume’s case studies. As Indigenous scholars and citizens of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the authors also reflect on the theme of Indigenous presence in American archaeology, particularly as the concept relates to the daily work of tribal heritage preservation, government-to-government consultations and other roles, as well as researching with, for, by, and in-between dynamic tribal and academic communities.