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Brick breaker quest 2971/25/2024 Maintenance camps on the CPRR in Utah, both east and west of Promontory Summit, are described and comparisons made with known ethnic Chinese construction camps on the CPRR from the 1860s and railroad camps in Montana dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is suggested that maintenance camp design, size, and function continued to resemble 1860s construction camps throughout the remainder of the 19th Century, perhaps even beyond that time. Railroad documents, previous excavations of ethnic Chinese worker camps in Nevada and recently recorded camps near Promontory Summit, Utah, show that the railroad continued to employ Chinese workers for decades after 1869. After the railroad was complete, it was necessary to upgrade the railroad and carry out maintenance on the far flung transportation network. The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) was completed in May 1869 due, in large part, to the work of thousands of ethnic Chinese railroad workers. The materiality of daily life at railroad work camps is interconnected with the risks the workers endured and the wealth that their labor generated for railroad owners and investors. As archaeologists expand collaboration with each other and with scholars in other fields, interpretations of archaeological research move beyond site-specific description into analyses that trace the changing experiences of workers as they entered new environments and new landscapes. Especially in light of the rarity of documents authored by the workers themselves, archaeology can provide direct evidence of habitation, culinary practices, health care, social relations, and economic networks. The artifacts, sites, and landscapes provide a rich source of empirical information about the historical experiences of Chinese railroad workers. Since the 1960s, archaeologists have studied the work camps of Chinese immigrant and Chinese American laborers who built the railroads of the American West. There is no inherent outer limit to the archaeology of futurity, a point illustrated by a closing reflection about connections between the author’s own positionality and the historical exploitation of Chinese railroad workers. Attending to the temporal dimensions of risk and hope requires stretching archaeological methodologies beyond the work camps themselves to the workers’ childhood villages in China’s Pearl River Delta, to railroad section houses and station towns throughout the North American West, and to urban Chinatowns in major coastal cities. This evidence also reveals workers’ dependencies on commodity chains that constrained laborers’ abilities to resist exploitation. The artifacts and features excavated at railroad work camps provide evidence of laborers’ efforts to care for themselves under extreme conditions. How can archaeologists, whose research is typically anchored in place-based sites and landscapes, apprehend the scale of mobility and pace of transformation inherent to immigration, industrialization, capitalism, and settler colonialism? Through a focus on the lived experiences of nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers, this study advances a multisited, polytemporal methodology that interprets archaeological evidence through lenses of precarity and futurity.
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