Events

March 28, 2025 | 11:00 am–12:30 pm Join PCM on Saturday, March 28, at 11:00 a.m. for the final presentation in our Hidden Histories series. Archaeologist Jocelyn Lee will share the history of the lesser-known mining camp Althouse and the Chinese miners who worked there. To register for this free event, click on the tickets link.

In the mid-to-late 19th century, Chinese placer miners established camps in the forested mountains of southern Oregon. Unlike other more famous mining camps, Althouse, named after the two brothers who discovered gold at this site in 1852, is not well documented. Therefore, we conducted archaeological investigations in this area to learn more about the daily lives of Chinese miners in Southern Oregon. This talk presents preliminary findings from fieldwork conducted in 2023 as part of a Passport In Time project with the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, Southern Oregon University, and Oregon Archaeological Society. The archaeological story at Althouse sheds light on how Chinese miners moved across the Oregon landscape as they pursued economic opportunities.

FEATURED SPEAKER
Jocelyn Lee is a PhD candidate in Archaeology/ Anthropology at Stanford University. Her dissertation is on Chinese diaspora archaeology in Oregon looking at the movement between labor camps and small community centers in rural landscapes. In addition, Jocelyn’s research seeks to connect archaeological interpretations with present-day communities through the combination of countermapping, archival, and material analyses to help understand contemporary Chinese American’s conception of historical places. In the summer of 2023, she led a Passport In Time (PIT) project along with the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest on a Chinese mining camp in Southern Oregon to investigating Chinese American history in Oregon.