Archaeologist Jade Luiz earned her PhD studying the old brothels of Boston, where Massachusetts’ deep Puritan roots drove sex work into the shadows.

Finding traces of that history a century later was tricky. Old newspapers and records rarely spoke plainly about prostitution in the Northeast, leaving Luiz to sift through innuendo to identify her next dig site.

She was delighted to find another sort of history out West. Now an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, she has been working since 2023 to excavate the red-light district of Central City, an hour west of Denver.

“What we see coming out of the ground tells us about the way people were living and working in this district,” she said. “We’re starting to see evidence that they weren’t shunned as people.”

She

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