Volume 3, Issue 1

Page 5

Faculty Notes (continued)

Mark Warner, (mwarner@uidaho.edu) Assistant Professor, Anthropology, was recently featured in the November/December 2001 issue of Archaeology magazine.  Warner's article titled "Ham Hocks on Your Cornflakes: Examining the Role of Food in African American Identity" builds off of a study of several thousand excavated animal bones to explore the symbolic link between food and African Americans in the nineteenth century.
Priscilla Wegars (pwegars@uidaho.edu), Adjunct Assistant Professor and Volunteer Curator of AACC, has been sharing her research on Polly Bemis and Idaho's World War II Kooskia Internment Camp with audiences in Idaho, Washington, and California.

Student Research in Historical Archaeology

As many of you know the Anthropology program here has had a long tradition of involvement in historical archaeology.  That tradition continues today and will be evident at the upcoming Northwest Anthropological Conference.  Thanks to a grant from the John Calhoun Smith Fund at least seven students will be presenting their research in historical archaeology at the conference, which will be held in Boise, Idaho on April 10-13, 2002.  Both undergraduates and graduate students will be presenting papers.  The graduate students will be presenting papers associated with their theses while the undergraduates will be presenting work that is a continuation of class-based research projects.

Graduate Student Marilyn Sandmeyer Completes
Research on Collection from Silver City

Thanks to financial support from the John Calhoun Smith Memorial Fund, Marilyn (Tutti) Sandmeyer has been able to complete research for her master=s thesis.  The thesis concerns the analysis of both Chinese and Euro American ceramics from archaeological excavations that took place at Silver City, Idaho in Owyhee County in 1987 and 1988.  Dr. Rick Sprague offered the excavations as a summer program conducted by the Anthropology Department at the U of I.
Comparisons are being drawn between the Chinese miners and laborers who occupied Chinatown in Silver City and a large hotel dump site.  Ethnicity and cultural traditions are specific to the analysis phase of the thesis.  Most of the ceramic artifacts are very fragmented, but some nearly intact pieces in the collections reveal both maker=s marks and decoration patterns.  Silver City was a gold and silver boomtown from 1863 until the early 20th century.  Out of a peak population of about 2500, 700 were of Chinese descent. Analysis indicates that the Chinese retained a separate, distinct cultural identity in this isolated, mountainous town and maintained Chinese values such as their own religion and burial repatriation customs of returning bones of the deceased to China.  The ceramic artifacts also indicate that they maintained distinct food way traditions from remains of rice bowls, teacups, soupspoons, and soy sauce containers.  The hotel site produced whiteware artifacts such as serving platters, coffee cups, and plates consistent with a Euro American clientele.  A few pieces of Chinese