Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis examines the historical and archaeological traces of European American settlers at the confluence of the Stillaguamish River in Washington State as a representation of settler-colonial interactions in the Pacific Northwest from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. I use a privy assemblage originally excavated through cultural resource mitigation in 2008 in conjunction with archival research to construct a biographical picture of the Teagar, Lovelace, and Weimer families who occupied the site between 1890 and 1940. My use of the biographical approach weaves together narratives of landscape, humans, and objects to challenge and critique prevailing narratives of frontier and the mythos of the American West. The mechanisms of biography are a combination between objects’ lives before being brought to their final deposition in the privy, the meanings constructed around multiple cultures and families interacting with the privy, and the larger shifting social, economic, and geographic landscape. I demonstrate that the biographical approach to material culture analysis is uniquely suited to collections-based research. It also adds nuance to frontier histories due to its incorporation of complex and sometimes conflicting multivalent meanings of artifacts.