Mangling Symbols of Gentility in the Wild West: Case Studies in Interpretive Archaeology

Gentility (aka, "Victorian culture") was the preeminent model of propriety in mid- and late-nineteenth-century California. Thanks to industrial production and an efficient supply network, the genteel mores of Victoria's England came to be expressed in a suite of artifacts that became de rigueur for anyone who aspired to a position of respectability—even in the wilds of the American West. The trappings of gentility, however, were not used only by the aspiring white middle class to achieve some kind of nervous social acceptance. In this essay, we present archaeological examples from a high-ranking Mexican-Californio, a Chinese American merchant, African American porters, and an expensive brothel to suggest that the symbols of gentility had power outside the parlors of the white middle class and that other groups manipulated the potent symbolic content of these artifacts for their own diverse ends. [African Americans, Chinese Americans, historical archaeology, interpretive archaeology, Victorianism]