Arboretum Chinese Quarters
Christopher
Lowman

My 2017 Stahl Award supported the care of artifacts recovered during the completion of excavations at Stanford University’s Arboretum Chinese Quarters (ACQ). Excavations carried out between November 2016 and June 2017, through a combination of Berkeley, Stanford, and local volunteer teams, recovered several thousand artifacts dating to the site’s occupation by Chinese employees of the Stanford family between 1876 and 1925. The project has relied on a combination of archaeology, archival research, and oral history contributions from descendants of early Chinese immigrants to the Bay Area and other stakeholders. These sources together are revealing the many ways that these men, and a few women, worked here in California, taking on multiple professions simultaneously to support themselves, each other, and their extended families, including cooking, gardening, laundries, agriculture, horticulture, becoming merchants, and running restaurants. Thanks to Stahl support, the artifacts are being bagged, catalogued, and analyzed in preparation for my dissertation.

 

Research Date: 
2017
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