This revised edition of Dr Neville A. Ritchie’s 1986 PhD dissertation explores the history and archaeology of the 19th century Chinese mining communities in the Clutha Valley, New Zealand. Lavishly illustrated with black-and-white line drawings of Chinese domestic and industrial sites, and of the artefacts excavated from them, this study offers unprecedented insight into the life and material culture of these male-only “sojourner” communities. Widely considered the most comprehensive archaeological study of overseas Chinese miners’ experience anywhere in the world, this volume contains the total summation and analysis of artefacts found in 23 Chinese sites excavated over nine years, which included two camps (with 40 individual huts and other features), a Chinese store and 20 rural sites, including miner’s huts and rock shelters. Considered by the Australian Society for Historical Archaeology to be a seminal work in the field of historical archaeology, this 2023 edition introduces Dr. Ritchie’s groundbreaking work to the next generation of archaeologists.

Reveals a fascinating story of how Chinese fish curers successfully dominated Australia's fishing industry; how they lived, worked, organised themselves, participated in colonial society, and the reasons why they suddenly disappeared.

This volume provides an important new synthesis of archaeological work carried out in Australia on the post-contact period. It draws on dozens of case studies from a wide geographical and temporal span to explore the daily life of Australians in settings such as convict stations, goldfields, whalers' camps, farms, pastoral estates and urban neighbourhoods. The different conditions experienced by various groups of people are described in detail, including rich and poor, convicts and their superiors, Aboriginal people, women, children, and migrant groups. The social themes of gender, class, ethnicity, status and identity inform every chapter, demonstrating that these are vital parts of human experience, and cannot be separated from archaeologies of industry, urbanization and culture contact. The book engages with a wide range of contemporary discussions and debates within Australian history and the international discipline of historical archaeology. The colonization of Australia was part of the international expansion of European hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The material discussed here is thus fundamentally part of the global processes of colonization and the creation of settler societies, the industrial revolution, the development of mass consumer culture, and the emergence of national identities. Drawing out these themes and integrating them with the analysis of archaeological materials highlights the vital relevance of archaeology in modern society.

The only book that comprehensively covers the fortunes of Chinese immigrants in New Zealand from the earliest encounters in the mid-1800s, to the present day (including transnationalism) offering valuable data and expert viewpoints for international study and comparision. A timely book that will strike chords with the Chinese communiities in Australia, Canada and the United states, because of the strikingly similar expieriences of members of those communities at the hands of colonial governments and sometimes xenophobic societies.

Asian American Bibliography - Priscilla Wegars

This book offers a fresh perspective on the Chinese diaspora. It is about the mobilisation of knowledge across time and space, exploring the history of Chinese market gardening in Australia and New Zealand. It enlarges our understanding of processes of technological change and human mobility, highlighting the mobility of migrants as an essential element in the mobility and adaptation of technologies. Truly multidisciplinary, Chinese Market Gardening in Australia and New Zealand incorporates elements of economic, agricultural, social, cultural and environmental history, along with archaeology, to document how Chinese market gardeners from subtropical southern China adapted their horticultural techniques and technologies to novel environments and the demands of European consumers. It shows that they made a significant contribution to the economies of Australia and New Zealand, developing flexible strategies to cope with the vagaries of climate and changing business and social environments which were often hostile towards Asian immigrants. Chinese Market Gardening in Australia and New Zealand will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of the Chinese diaspora, in particular the history of the Chinese in Australasia; the history of technology; horticultural and garden history; and environmental history, as well as Asian studies more generally.

In the early twentieth century, an industrial salmon cannery thrived along the Fraser River in British Columbia. Chinese factory workers lived in an adjoining bunkhouse, and Japanese fishermen lived with their families in a nearby camp. Today the complex is nearly gone and the site overgrown with vegetation, but artifacts from these immigrant communities linger just beneath the surface. In this groundbreaking comparative archaeological study of Asian immigrants in North America, Douglas Ross excavates the Ewen Cannery to explore how its immigrant workers formed a new cultural identity in the face of dramatic displacement. Ross demonstrates how some homeland practices persisted while others changed in response to new contextual factors, reflecting the complexity of migrant experiences. Instead of treating ethnicity as a bounded, stable category, Ross shows that ethnic identity is shaped and transformed as cultural traditions from home and host societies come together in the context of local choices, structural constraints, and consumer society.