Archaeology of the Urban Working Class

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jade W Luiz.

Places of organized prostitution in the nineteenth-century operated within a very particular sensory framework. In many ways male patrons were paying for ambiance and sensory experience as well as sex. Through analysis of the material remains of brothel sites, such as items related to dining, lighting, or even personal hygiene, archaeology can potentially recreate the experienced context of these spaces. Sites, such as the brothel at 27/29 Endicott Street in Boston’s North End, have the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Pelto.

The Clifton site , located on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, was the settlement site for the Cliff Mine, the first profitable copper mine in Michigan. Operating throughout the 1850s and 60s, the town of Clifton began to disappear around 1871 when the Boston and Pittsburgh mining company ceased operations and began to lease out the land to individual prospectors. The Industrial Archaeology program at Michigan Technological University has been performing field work at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Webster.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boston’s North End became home to thousands of European immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy. The majority of these immigrant families lived in crowded tenement apartments and earned their wages from low-paying jobs such as manual laborers or store clerks. The Ebenezer Clough House, which was originally built as a single-family colonial home in the early eighteenth century, was repurposed as a tenement in the nineteenth century, becoming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine D. Thomas.

Residents of Jackson, North Carolina in Northampton County have found what they believe to be an 18th century tavern site. The area was inhabited by the Tuscarora until the Tuscarora War ended in 1715, after which European settlers began to move into the region. The residents of Jackson believe this to be a tavern owned by Jeptha Atherton.  This research assesses this claim by comparing those artifacts to the artifacts at two other contemporary taverns: Dudley’s Tavern in Halifax, North Carolina...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick H. Garrow.

Most of the sites we investigate have architectural remains, middens, and features. Artifacts collected from middens often span the history of the site. Features may represent frozen moments in time, but rarely reflect the total material culture of the household and contain artifacts that have been removed from their household and discarded. The site discussed in this paper contains a residence that was destroyed by fire during the second decade of the twentieth century. The house was occupied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Schuyler.

Most places and people who have existed in world history have left few if any primary or personal records (archtectural descriptions, ground plans, inventories, personal letters, journals, diaries, or memoirs). The excavation of a standard 19th Century saloon in Utah and the biography of its owner serve as an example of how multiple ranges of information can be used to reconstruct many average past institutions on both a physical and human level. Only one saloon owner on the Western frontier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Andrew Buchner.

  The town of Jacksonport, Arkansas was established in the late 1830s near the confluence of the White and Black rivers, and rose to prominence during the 1850s to 1870s as a key steamboat town and as the Jackson County seat.  However, after being bypassed by the railroad the town declined and by 1892, it was largely deserted.   In 2009, the planned construction of a collection management facility lead to data recovery excavations within two town lots, as well as the recovery of detailed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cori Rich.

Archaeology has allowed for underrepresented, often invisible, groups of people within history to become visible and have their stories told.  Despite archaeologists’ best efforts in identifying these underrepresented groups; there is still much work yet to be conducted. There is a lack of information from the eighteenth-century, and even less work done on the way ethnicity and class impact women’s visibility within the archaeological record. This paper utilizes seven site reports, from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oliver Mueller-Heubach.

In Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, northerners, free blacks, and Quakers operating on the periphery of the Southern cause challenged its basic foundations. Here, overlooking the James River and its busy docks at ‘Rocketts,’ stood the stoneware pottery of the Quaker Parr family. Already prominent potters in Baltimore, the Parrs came to Richmond a decade earlier and now partnered with a local auctioneer of Quaker extraction. In trying to keep their operation afloat, the Parrs came up against...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deirdre Kelleher.

During the 19th century, Elfreth’s Alley in Old City Philadelphia was the bustling home of a community of immigrants from across Europe.  Today, however, the residential street is remembered and lauded primarily for its early colonial roots.  The Alley, which was formed circa 1702 and contains 32 brick row houses, was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1960 and was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a notable representation of surviving, early American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jackie L. Rodgers.

Archaeological studies have been conducted upon red light districts across the United States. While these studies have yielded great insight into the lives of prostitutes, relatively little has been recovered from their customers. Three collections from excavations conducted in 1975 and 2000 upon Pensacola, Florida’s red light district have also been studied, with a surprising number of artifacts associated with customers identified. This paper will provide an in-depth analysis of red light...