CENTRAL CITY — On the hillside of a Colorado valley ringed by bygone gold mines, a team of archaeologists-in-training wielding paintbrushes uncovered a buried treasure of their own this week — a 19th-century shoe that may have belonged to a lady of the night.
Jade Luiz, an assistant professor in Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, has a niche archeological focus: documenting 19th-century sex work by digging up and studying artifacts at the sites of former brothels.
Lucky for Luiz, the Gilpin County mountain town of Central City is ripe for brothel breakthroughs. The remnants of its red-light district, which thrived during the late 1800s, are perched on a hillside overlooking the casino-filled tourist town.
MSU Denver associate professor Jade Luiz shows a photo of the site from 1900 as student Natalie Aragon digs during an archeological field study in Central City, Colorado, on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)She and her crew are digging where brothels and their inhabitants once stood. Nothing has ever been built over them, meaning the ground isn’t sullied with unrelated debris.
This is Luiz’s third field semester at the Central City location, where she trains MSU Denver students in the basics of excavation and documentation. The crew began the current excavation at the beginning of June.
“You couldn’t ask for a more perfect site,” Luiz said Wednesday. “It’s a great place to train students.”
Prostitution was never legal in Central City, but the industry and people involved were prominent enough to warrant an annual street festival that still exists today, honoring the city’s most famous madam, Lou Bunch. Last week, Lou Bunch Day celebrants dressed in 19th-century attire and hopped aboard beds on wheels to be pushed down the street in the legendary “Famous Bed Race.”
A few days later, Luiz and her MSU Denver archaeology students climbed in and out of pits in the ground as they gingerly sifted through the grounds that Bunch and her associates once roamed.
Their bounty so far included furniture springs, wallpaper, buttons, textiles, chandelier scraps, whole shoes and a suspender clip monogrammed with the initials “EBM.”
Once Luiz and her students are finished with their excavation next week, they’ll tackle archival research, including sifting through old newspaper articles searching for a person matching those initials.
Their discoveries will be stored at the university’s downtown Denver campus for the time being, Luiz said, as she tries to arrange a museum exhibit in Central City to bring the history back home.
MSU Denver students Nate Benson and Jordan Duran sift through sediment during an archeological field study in Central City, Colorado on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)Luiz likens her work to digging through trash to get a fuller picture of what life used to be like, then documenting that for posterity.
“I love personal clothing items because you can see things like toe or heel prints in shoes, and it’s like fingerprints,” Luiz said.
The shoes were student Chris Weber’s favorite find so far, too.
“Finding these personal items is like connecting with people in the past,” Weber said. “It’s being able to put the pieces of history together.”
The 36-year-old MSU alumnus was taking Luiz’s field course to beef up his archaeology skills for his job in cultural resource management for the U.S. Army. He’s learning how to carefully extract artifacts, document materials and do lab work.
Alonza Saldo, 25, screamed when he and his peers first spotted the leather shoe sticking up out of the dirt. There was even some shoe polish left on the leather, Saldo said.
MSU Denver students Kris Holien, Alonza Saldo and Elliot Borthwick Hoff excavate a site during an archeological field study in Central City, Colorado, on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)Related Articles
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Nate Benson, 41, was a former Army man in search of a mid-life career change. A self-proclaimed “outdoor cat,” he said he was in search of a job that let him play outside. He figured, why not give MSU’s archaeology field course a try?
Benson hopes to take the skills he learns in Luiz’s course and apply them to a job in ethnobotany, where he can study the relationship between humans and plants.
When Benson posts photos of his finds on social media, he said his buddies go wild with jealousy that he’s finding treasure in the dirt. He encourages anyone in search of a mid-career change to go for it.
“You’re only going to miss out on dreams you don’t take,” Benson said, sifting through brothel remains. “You don’t want to have to look back and say, ‘What if?'”
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