The Donner Party: An Archaeological Perspective on a Tragedy in the Sierras

Despite the literature arguing to expand the temporal scope of historical archaeology, the majority of card-carrying historical archaeologists belong to the Society for Historical Archaeology (2007), which treats the discipline as a period of study dedicated to "early European settlement [in the Americas] and its effects on Native American peoples, as well as the subsequent spread of the frontier and later urbanization and industrialization." In view of the abundance of information available to archaeologists studying the topics previously noted, it is challenging to justify archaeology of the past 500 years- especially archaeology of the nineteenth century (i.e., the era of the Donner Party)-when there is ample documentation related to that era's material culture and historical events.