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Abstract
The Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project is one of the longest-running community archaeology projects in North America and one of the largest material studies of a 19th century Chinatown. This legacy collection, excavated in the 1980s, contains a rich history of everyday life in the Market Street Chinatown in San Jose, California. While there have been extensive studies of the animal bone, plant remains, and ceramics from the site, this report is the first systematic analysis of the glass containers and tablewares. The results reveal that the inhabitants of the Chinatown were purchasing and consuming a range of goods in glass packaging: alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, preserved foods, medicines, and household products. These products clearly show that the residents of the Chinatown were engaging with local, national, and international markets, and incorporating new products into their diets and lives. In addition, glass containers can be strongly temporally diagnostic. New research into 26 companies whose products were found in the Chinatown are used to date the archaeological deposits, revealing a small but previously unrecognized post-Chinatown element in the collection. This company research, alongside the analysis of the glass corpus as a whole represents a substantial contribution to our understanding of 19th century Californian archaeology and to Chinese diaspora archaeology worldwide.
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2026
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Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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Anthropology