Sponsored by: AIA-Santa Fe Society
Lecture. Donna Seifert (Former president Society for Historical Archaeology). Case studies from various nineteenth-century sites where material culture reveals evidence of prostitution, including a brothel in Five Points—New York City’s most notorious neighborhood—and parlor houses a few blocks from the White House and Capitol Hill. Also Brothels in the American West are also looked at—in urban Los Angeles and in frontier sites and mining camps in Sandpoint, Idaho; Prescott, Arizona; and Fargo, North Dakota. The artifact assemblages found at these sites often contradict written records, allowing archaeologists to construct a more realistic and complicated picture of daily life for working-class women involved in commercial sex.