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The Fresh and the Salted: Chinese Migrant Fisheries Engagement and Trade in Nineteenth-Century North America

Zooarchaeological identifications of fish taxa at nineteenth-century Chinese migrant sites in North America indicate that Chinese consumers maintained local, regional, and international connections with a number of discrete fisheries to satisfy their desire for both fresh and salted fish products. To date, no archaeological study has addressed the broader complexity of the Chinese fish trade in North America. This paper explores these intricacies by drawing on historical observations of nineteenth-century Chinese fishing operations in North America, zooarchaeological fish data from sites across the American West, and an in-depth case study of archaeologically recovered fish remains from the Market Street Chinatown in San Jose, California. To better understand the fish data from this site, I use indicator group analysis to identify several likely sources of the specimens identified at the site. Overall, the data show that, although Chinese migrants typically consumed fish taxa that resembled those traditionally eaten in nineteenth-century southern China, they sourced their fish from multiple Chinese and Anglo fisheries throughout the American West and China.