Before Stanford: Founding Communities, Present Pasts

As Stanford celebrates its 125th year, curators use discoveries of campus archaeology to ask, “where did Stanford come from?” Rather than taking 1891 as our university’s beginning, students find a complex origin in communities that occupied these lands before Stanford—and since. Multiple narratives and deep connections between present and past persist through archaeologies of these founding communities, including: Ohlone tribal people, Mexican and Spanish colonists, and generations of laborers. This exhibit was developed as part of the spring 2015 course Museum Cultures: Material Representation in the Past and Present, Christina J. Hodge, Instructor. It is the flagship component of the Stanford Archaeology Center's Before Stanfordinitative, bringing to light stories of the deep and diverse cultural history of Stanford lands. The exhibit is presented in assocaition with Stanford 125, the university's 125th anniversaryhighlighting the school's transformative impacts at the individual and global scale.

ON VIEW through Spring 2017