In the City: archaeology and the personal experience of urban transition

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross J Wilson.

This paper assesses the development of the allotment gardens in the northern English city of York to demonstrate the processes of urban transition on a scale and on sites which are often overlooked in studies of city life. From the pressures of political reform, social change and environmental concerns, the allotment gardens in the city reflect local, national and international concerns from their origins in the early twentieth century to the present day. Through an assessment of archival...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Belford.

Industrialisation in England is often associated with urbanisation. Yet outside the major conurbations, many industrial settlements retained an essentially rural character. Although they contained ‘urban’ elements such as streets, rows of housing, churches and pubs, these settlements nestled within a predominantly rural landscape, and their inhabitants sustained semi-rural lifestyles – growing food, keeping animals and actively hunting and fishing. Using excavated examples from the East...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael R M Kiddey.

Archaeological analysis of successive ‘home’ spaces created by homeless people enables the documentation of increased privatisation and surveillance within the cities of Bristol and York and reveals the divisive effect they have on social interactions. Using maps, photographs and oral testimonies from homeless people, this paper examines how ‘home’ spaces are grilled off and monitored and asks what this means for the future of ‘public’ spaces. Through subtle negotiations with gatekeepers and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan E. Edwards. Rebecca S. Graff.

In 1893 Chicago hosted an event that brought the entire world– and it’s foods– together in the space of an ephemeral ‘white city’.  The World’s Columbian Exposition– America’s showcase for the possibilities of an increasingly globalized, modern world– was itself taking place in an uneasily globalizing and modernizing city. The aim here is to access something of the texture of one very intimate aspect of personal life in the midst of such transition– in the consumption of and reaction to food by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James R Dixon.

Looking to urban life in the recent past, present and future, conventional archaeological chronologies are of less relevance than in deeper history. Instead, we might replace ordered time with duration, time-as-experienced, in our analyses. However, if we want to look at the duration of individual events in the city, we run the risk of reducing our work to a point where it is essentially meaningless, considering single seconds in individual lives at the expense of a 'bigger picture'. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas.

In Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, the results of archaeoological work and documentary sources, especially those relating to cadastral history, place the so called "House of the Typographer" as an example of the heterogeneity of dissimilar economic conditions of each historical time and of each individual families. By examining in detail these results it is possible to find changes in the conception of what might be seen as a desirable lifestyle as it is reproduced in close...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Fortenberry.

The town of St. George's served as Bermuda's colonial capital from 1612 to 1815. Over nearly three hundred years, the town flourished as Bermuda transitioned from a restrictive agriculture economy under the Somers Island Company to a powerful maritime economy under the Crown during the Free Holding period. In this paper I explore the changing urban landscape of St. George's from 1684 to 1730 as the town underwent a dramatic rebuilding when the Somers Island Company was dissolved and the town...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Fennelly.

Following development of a nineteenth century asylum complex in the North of England, a clay pipe bowl and stem fragment were discovered. The bowl was incised with the words ‘Dublin’, and may have related to a local pipe maker who catered for the demand of an increasing market of emigrant Irish. Its presence indicates the conscious cultivation of an Irish-abroad identity within the larger growing population of the North of England. This paper will look at the issue of ‘homesickness’, juxtaposing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Dwyer.

Historical archaeologists benefit from (or are overwhelmed by) closer chronological resolution and availability of varying sources than those studying other periods, inviting alternative approaches to interpretation. As an introduction to the session, this paper will provide a brief overview of archaeological thought on the subject of micro-scales, fine-grained research, and biographical approaches to the relatively recent past. In the context of the session theme, the paper will make reference...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo Rees Howell.

The migration of people is no new phenomenon. It is, however, relatively recent that state and bureaucratic obstacles and controls have developed restrictions on the flow of migrants. State authorised immigration from former colonies and European Union member states is well documented. However, ‘illegal’ immigration, primarily that of those entering the country seeking asylum under the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention, and the role and position of those immigrants in society, remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne F Clarke. Ursula K Frederick.

A slowly fading inscription, scored into a sandstone boulder at the North Head Quarantine Station, Sydney, records the names of three, or possibly four, people—John, Alice Oliver and George. Dated to July 1893 the inscription prompts immediate questions: who were John, Alice Oliver and George? Were they a family? Under what circumstances did they find themselves in quarantine? Where did they come from and how? Did they survive their time in quarantine, or is this a memorial to loved ones lost?...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Feit.

This paper explores the Schneider family, German immigrants who, between 1854 and 1920, built a successful saloon, general store, and a small real-estate empire in the heart of Austin, Texas.  Over a period of seventy years, they witnessed their neighborhood transition from quiet residential area, to  bawdy Red Light District, and eventually become a warehouse district. In spite of the family’s growing land wealth, they lived a modest lifestyle; and they remained in their original home until the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hanna Steyne.

Victorian London saw dramatic changes along the Thames, with the construction of the East End Docks and Thames Embankments, as the city struggled to cope with its ballooning population and prospering shipping industry. The Embankments reclaimed a stinking, effluent covered foreshore previously occupied by wharves, jetties, barge beds and slips, and contained a new sewer system and covered railways, finished with tree lined avenues and road access to central London. The Embankment has been hailed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felipe Gaitan-Ammann.

In 1671, Henry Morgan’s attack on the city of Panama put an end to its history as the first European settlement to take root on the shores of the Pacific.  Burnt down to ashes, the once buoyant urban center entered a process of ruination through which new generations of Panamanians have gradually forgotten or reinvented the memory of the places where their ill-fated ancestors used to live. This paper discusses some concrete examples of how archaeological research conducted at the World Heritage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Linn.

Archaeologists have long recognized that urban environments are frequently hazardous to the health of residents. From the very first cities through the present, many urban populations have experienced higher rates of epidemic disease, endemic disease, and certain kinds of injuries than rural populations. Health is thus both a primary concern for public officials in cities and a daily struggle for ordinary urban-dwellers. This paper discusses the health-related challenges faced by rural Irish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah J. M. May.

Schools are a key component of urbanism, places where the regulatory apparatus of the state reaches into the lives of families. High density, busy, with ever shifting power politics creating spaces of fear and safety; creativity and control. In many ways they are hyper-urban. The establishment of Board Schools at the end of the 19th century in Britain coincides with the expansion of coastal cites such as Portsmouth. Throughout the 20th century ideology has been explicitly and publicly expressed...