Burnette, Richard T., authorVan Buren, Mary, advisorKwiatkowski, Lynn, committee memberOrsi, Jared, committee member2007-01-032007-01-032014http://hdl.handle.net/10217/83909The historical artifact collection recovered from the Vanoli Sporting Complex site (5OR30), a brothel district adjacent to the Second Street red-light district in Ouray, Colorado, in the United States, has stimulated a number of anthropological questions regarding the social processes enabling the rapid growth and long-term sustentation of sporting-male commerce in Colorado mining towns in the latter-half of the nineteenth-century. Potentially representing the real economic engine responsible for the viability of tenuous western mining towns, prostitution was tacitly accepted by moral Victorian elites, underscoring the entrenched nature of masculine ideologies and customs. The class-based regulatory structures adopted to exploit and control the illicit commerce would have an alienating influence over the lives of prostitutes, significantly altering the relations of power forged between men and women in these urbanized mining towns. Ironically, the pervasiveness of long-standing homocentric paradigms in western historical literature has continued to mask the socio-cultural and economic significance of masculine social institutions in numerous industrial sub-regions emerging in the mining west. Benefiting from the advances made in the discourse on gender and power, this archaeological study assesses the changing life ways of prostitutes within a brothel district, providing a unique perspective on gendered relations of power in a western mining context.born digitalmasters thesesengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.masculinitywestern miningVanolirelations of powerred-light districtText