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Accepted Paper:
Understanding environmental history through archaeology, material culture and archives—new perspectives on overseas Chinese environmental history
James Beattie
(Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Research Associate, Faculty of History, University of Johannesburg)
Richard Walter
(University of Otago)
This paper uses methods and evidence from archaeology, material culture and archives to present new understandings of the environmental history of the overseas Chinese through a case study of a major Cantonese settlement in southern New Zealand.
Paper long abstract:
This paper uses methods and evidence from archaeology, material culture and archives to present new understandings of the environmental history of the overseas Chinese through a case study of a major Cantonese settlement in southern New Zealand. Lawrence Chinese Camp remained the most important Chinese settlement throughout nineteenth-century Otago from its establishment in the 1870s to the early 1900s. Evidence derived from four major archaeological excavations, from archival sources and from surviving material culture paints a vivid picture of the environmental history of the settlement. Archaeological findings reveal major environmental changes to landscape, from drainage to urban design, as well as local and global resource demand through material culture. More fascinatingly perhaps, material culture and archival evidence together provide examples of the manner in which—through the concepts drawn from geomancy—Cantonese migrants made sense of and changed the landscape around them.