The Archaeology of Precarious Lives: Chinese Railroad Workers in Nineteenth-Century North America

Abstract

How can archaeologists, whose research is typically anchored in place-based sites and landscapes, apprehend the scale of mobility and pace of transformation inherent to immigration, industrialization, capitalism, and settler colonialism? Through a focus on the lived experiences of nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers, this study advances a multisited, polytemporal methodology that interprets archaeological evidence through lenses of precarity and futurity. The artifacts and features excavated at railroad work camps provide evidence of laborers’ efforts to care for themselves under extreme conditions. This evidence also reveals workers’ dependencies on commodity chains that constrained laborers’ abilities to resist exploitation. Attending to the temporal dimensions of risk and hope requires stretching archaeological methodologies beyond the work camps themselves to the workers’ childhood villages in China’s Pearl River Delta, to railroad section houses and station towns throughout the North American West, and to urban Chinatowns in major coastal cities. There is no inherent outer limit to the archaeology of futurity, a point illustrated by a closing reflection about connections between the author’s own positionality and the historical exploitation of Chinese railroad workers.

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