San Francisco (Other Keyword)
1-13 (13 Records)
As part of the work undertaken as part of the rehabilitation of the historic Federal Office Building at 50 United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, the US General Services Administration uncovered some of the remaining foundations for San Francisco’s old City Hall, which was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. These foundations represent the easternmost extent of the city hall, which had not been previously documented. Previous work on the rehabilitation project had turned up artifacts that...
Archaeology is Appealing: Collaborative Approaches to Foster Public Engagement with the Past (2016)
The technology industry is rapidly transforming the social and physical landscape of San Francisco. While the city’s zeitgeist is orientated toward the future, archaeologists labor to recover and record its vanishing history. The enormous scale of construction has resulted in an unprecedented volume of artifacts and data that all too often languish on shelves and in gray literature. Budget crunches and curation crises have led to cooperation with institutions at the forefront of public...
Assessing Archaeological Sensitivity in San Francisco (2015)
The San Francisco Planning Department archaeological staff reviews hundreds of projects for archaeological sensitivity each year as part of the California Environmental Quality Act review process. To aid this review, the Department has begun a long-term GIS project creating thematic maps and related datasets to inform archeological site identification, to determine interrelationships between archeological sites and historical land uses, and to direct research designs. Over the last 8 years the...
El Presidio de San Francisco: Investigating Daily Life on the Spanish Frontier (2015)
In 1776, Spain sent thirty families from what is now Mexico to establish El Presidio de San Francisco as the northernmost outpost of their empire. Presidial soldiers defended adjacent Catholic missions and policed California Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area. The historical record is largely silent on the lives of colonial families and their relationships with indigenous people. This paper summarizes research at the archaeological site of El Presidio de San Francisco since its discovery in...
A Freeway Through the Past: The Replacement of Doyle Drive through the Presidio of San Francisco National Historic Landmark (2015)
The historic south access road to the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, was known as Doyle Drive. It was identified as structurally and seismically deficient in the early 2000's and construction on its replacement began in 2009 by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). The Doyle Drive Project was unique in that it spanned the Presidio of San Francisco, a National Historical Landmark District, and that it involved several agency landholdings and stakeholders including the Presidio...
GIS Model Development for Historic Census Data in San Francisco (2015)
This article demonstrates how to build historical data sets from the 1800-1900 San Francisco census/city directories, using GIS model to enhance the meaning of the census data and add a micro-depth, and to enable researchers to depict and analyze the spatial pattern of their study. The raw data of the census/city directories is organized according to addresses (parcels). The historic census GIS model integrates the city parcels to the census/city directories to spatially process and map the...
Haunting, Urban Restructuring, and the Spectropolitics of Consumptive Spaces in San Francisco (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 19th century San Francisco, tuberculosis infected nearly one in ten individuals. Unlike other racially charged epidemics, tuberculous ostensibly targeted individuals across all classed, gendered, and racialized groups. This, combined with tuberculosis’ spatial indeterminacy and geographic mutability, rendered consumptive spaces and...
Irish Independence in the Crapper? Irish Republican Army Buttons in San Francisco (2017)
This paper examines two Irish Rublician Army buttons discovered in a privy associated with a late 19th century household in San Francisco in order to elucidate how Irish immigrants became Irish Americans on the West Coast. Archaeologits and historians have studied the Irish Diaspora, this they have largely focused on the Northeast. While the Irish Republican Army is familiar to contemporary audiences, many people are unaware of the organization’s 19th century roots in the United States. The...
Life on Grove Street: Victorian Households in Hayes Valley, San Francisco (2015)
During the mid to late 19th Century, Hayes Valley was a San Francisco neighborhood transitioning from working to middle class. Residents included European immigrants and transplants from other parts of the US. Many families rented the single and multifamily residences that lined the streets. In 2013, Pacific Legacy, Inc. conducted testing and archaeological monitoring excavations for the construction of a multistory building on Grove Street in the Hayes Valley. These investigations unearthed...
Markets, Churches, Piers, & Foundries: Some of the Patterns of Everyday Life in Late-19th-Century San Francisco. (2016)
The everyday paths and patterns of late-19th-century San Franciscans brought them to a variety of businesses, workplaces, and institutions. This paper will use the archaeological and historical data from a series of domestic sites located in the South of Market Neighborhood in San Francisco to trace these paths throughout the city. Using an analysis of the local products, the schools, institutions, and workplaces, this paper seeks to shed light on the lives of working-class San Franciscans. In...
The Rise of Global Markets in Gold Rush San Francisco (2015)
When the discovery of gold in California was announced to the world, San Francisco almost instantly became the focal point of global activity. A steady flow of ships sailed to the fledgling city, carrying immigrants from ports as far-flung as Hong Kong, Valparaiso, London, and virtually every major entrepot on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Flooding into the city with these new arrivals was a vast assortment of commercial goods. Raw materials such as hardware and building supplies,...
A whaler unearthed: the 19th century whaling ship Candace in downtown San Francisco (2015)
While conducting archaeological investigations for a construction project in downtown San Francisco, William Self Associates, Inc. encountered the remains of an early 19th century whaling ship buried 15 feet below the modern surface. This paper will present the story of the whaler Candace, a Boston-built barque that ended her days in the mudflats of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Cove, the determined historical and archaeological research that led to her identification, and the unique insight into...
"You No Longer Leave Your Heart in San Francisco. The City Breaks It": Reconciling the Realities of Urban Displacement and Slow Archaeology. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. “Slow archaeology” includes a diverse array of theoretical and methodological concerns that orient scholars towards inclusive and engaged practices that foster longstanding relationships with stakeholder communities to develop meaningful research. This paper explores the suitability...