In Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in North America, Chelsea Rose and J. Ryan Kennedy assess the current state of Chinese diaspora studies. The volume presents archaeological investigations spanning multiple scales—including the individual, community, regional, and transpacific levels—and across rural and urban sites from the United States and China. The editors purposefully incorporate contributions from Chinese American scholars in an ongoing effort to decolonize the subject. In their introduction, Kennedy and Rose provide a much-needed synopsis of the archaeology of the field to date, including historical background of the Chinese diaspora, changing theoretical and methodological approaches, and future directions in examining historical and archaeological knowledge of late-1800s Chinese immigration. They deftly divide the following chapters in the volume into four sections focused on issues of theory, research themes, foodways, and outside perspectives.
The volume first addresses theoretical issues in Chinese diaspora studies. Douglas E. Ross persuasively argues for the idea of diaspora as a process to understand the motivations, behaviors, and choices of Chinese immigrants who moved to a diversity of locations, both collectively and individually. Writing “with an agenda” (p. 59), fifth-generation Chinese American Kelly N. Fong calls on Chinese diaspora archaeology to be more inclusive of Asian American scholars, more interdisciplinary, and more engaged with community partnerships. Rounding out the section, Priscilla Wegars defines appropriate terminology for referring to Chinese people and archaeological features. Highlighting the racist context of terms such as “joss house” and ignorant assumptions of structures such as “Chinese tunnels,” Wegars supplies an important glossary for those studying the Chinese diaspora.
Chapters in the “thematic” section provide case studies to illustrate major themes of current archaeological research. While confronting the inherent biases and limitations of such records, Barbara L. Voss draws on historical documents from women missionaries in the Chinatowns of San Jose, California, to shed light on the everyday lives of Chinese women and children, as well as the impacts—beyond conversion—that missionaries had on Chinatown residents. In one of the first published archaeological works about the Chinese diaspora outside of the American West, D. Ryan Gray's chapter on a Chinese laundry in New Orleans, Louisiana, gives context to the wide-ranging experiences of Chinese immigrants across the United States, while simultaneously complicating understandings of racial complexities in the American South during the Jim Crow era. Examining a Pompeii-esque snapshot of a single day, Chelsea Rose pieces together the assemblage from a burned-down Chinese home in an early Oregon mining town. She reconstructs the lived-in nature of the home, arrangement of daily activities, and foodways of the inhabitants.
Next, critiquing the essentialism and normativity that has long pervaded research into Chinese diaspora material culture, Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis argue for a more individual perspective on Chinese immigrants that accounts for the changing experiences throughout their lives. Christopher Merritt, on the other hand, laments the general lack of larger, state-wide scales that allow for comparative analyses. To that end, he synthesizes archaeological and historical resources from Montana to identify shifting trends in demographics, economic strategies, and legal restrictions between 1862 and 1943. Then, Laura W. Ng provides important insight into the other half of a transnational Chinese diaspora—the impacts in China. Tying American Chinatowns to Chinese home villages, Ng explores the connections of architecture, economics, kinship, and modern ideas of heritage across the Pacific.
In the first of three chapters about foodways, Charlotte K. Sunseri pushes back on the zooarchaeological focus at Chinese diaspora sites of equating meat cuts with ethnicity and class. Instead, she presents a comparison of sites across the West to investigate questions of choice, market access and distribution, and diversity of consumers revealed by faunal remains. Linda Bentz and Todd J. Braje outline the various strategies employed by Chinese fishermen along the California and Baja California coast. They explain the general methods of catching and harvesting squid, shrimp, and abalone; transpacific ties that made such endeavors profitable; and economic and political conditions that impacted the seafood markets. Virginia S. Popper discusses the myriad fruits, vegetables, and other botanical species used and consumed by the Chinese diaspora as well as the multitude of methods used to procure such goods, including purchasing, importing, growing, and gathering plants.
Finally, Henry Yu, a historian, cautions against overconnecting ideas of identity, nationalism, and persistence with concepts of transnationalism and diaspora. He encourages archaeologists to incorporate multisited analyses of networks to appreciate the flows of people, goods, knowledge, money, and documents throughout the Chinese diaspora, along with the variety inherent in such flows.
As with every edited volume, some chapters are stronger than others. But overall, the end result is a cohesive update on trends within the field. Rose and Kennedy's volume reveals that the future of Chinese diaspora archaeology can be more inclusive of Chinese voices and perspectives, more reflexive about biases in research questions and theoretical approaches, and more comprehensive in the geographic and temporal questions about Chinese individuals and communities posed by archaeologists and historians.
