This has been a year of exciting news and big developments with the Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project. At the beginning of the academic year we moved into a new lab. Located in the new archaeology building at Stanford University, this lab is a cutting-edge research facility in the heart of campus. This building includes space for artifact storage and analysis as well as room for our research library and multimedia equipment. Anybody interested in a tour of the new facility can e-mail us at bryn@stanford.ed to arrange a visit.

In other news, Professor Voss and Bryn Williams have organized a panel on overseas Chinese archaeology for this January’s Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in Sacramento. The Society for Historical Archaeology is the largest professional organization of historical archaeologists in the world. With participants from the United States, Australia and New Zealand, this panel will bring together archaeologists studying Overseas Chinese communities from around the globe. Research about Chinese communities in San José will feature prominently in this panel. It will be exciting to discuss the history and archaeology of the Market Street Chinatown with such a diverse group of international scholars.

2005 has started off with a bang in terms of the research we’ve been working on and presenting regarding the Market Street Chinatown! During the first week of January, I (Stacey) traveled to York, England, to present a paper Bryn and I co-authored entitled “Contesting Hollywood’s Chinatowns: An Archaeological Perspective on Early Overseas Chinatowns in Nineteenth Century America”. We received great feedback on it and will be revising it for a book on “Hollywood´s” representations of the past. A draft of our conference presentation will be posted on this website soon, so make sure to check back in a few days for it!

On behalf of Barb, Bryn, and myself, I´d like to thank everyone that attended our Archaeology Workshop held on January 20th at Stanford University´s Archaeology Center. In it, we discussed both the work we´ve done on the project and the work we hope to complete in the upcoming years. We were so pleased with the amazing turnout and the great comments and suggestions we received during the question and answer session.

 

 

 

 

Featured Artifact and Lab Update

A few weeks after our workshop, Bryn left for China and is quickly becoming fluent in Chinese. He’s enjoying his time in China and sends a big hello to everyone back in the states. I am also pleased to announce that a few new volunteers have been joining Erica and me in the lab. Arana, a first year Ph.D. student in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, and Beth, a volunteer from the Bay Area, have been helping us catalogue glass from Feature 18. They have been a great and welcome help!

Greetings once again from Stacey. The lab has been quite busy this past autumn quarter. Erica Simmons, a senior Archaeology major who worked on the Market Street Chinatown Project last year, has been volunteering her spare time in the lab since September. She has been a great help, and in just a short time, finished cataloguing a large portion of the glass from Feature 18. In the meantime, I have continued to catalogue buttons from the entire assemblage.

This month I also had the opportunity to catalogue and photograph the artifacts on display at History San Jose. History San Jose’s Melissa Johnson and Monica Tucker were extremely helpful in assisting me with this task. They were kind enough to lend me the museum’s photography studio, where the photograph to the left was taken.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Featured Artifact

This week’s featured artifact is currently on display at History San Jose’s reconstructed Ng Shing Gung temple. According to the Asian American Comparative Collection’s (AACC) terminologies, this vessel is a “liquor warmer.” It could have also been used as a teapot or sauce-serving bottle. Its decoration is commonly known as “Sweet Pea”, but is also sometimes called “Plant with Central Flower”, “Shanghai Ware”, or “Simple Flower”.