Historical and Contemporary Archaeologies of the City: Opportunities and Challenges

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zada Komara.

Appalachia’s historic company coal towns were unique urban spaces: company-built extraction settlements, which consolidated diverse working families.  Coal mining is integral to Appalachia’s regional identity, yet company towns are seen as transient, quasi-urban phenomena on a fundamentally rural landscape.  This paper aims to: 1.) illuminate Appalachian cities and challenge the construction of Appalachia as a rural region, 2.) complicate the city/country dichotomy and place company coal towns...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilary Orange.

Artificial light is synonymous with modernity and the industrial age. Light turns night into day, guides our way, and transforms place and material. Despite its centrality within the urban experience, light studies are fragmented across a diverse set of fields including, among others, architecture, history, planning and art. Where historical and contemporary archaeology are concerned, light and light-based technologies have received little attention. In 2015, the International Year of Light...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Lorin Brace VI.

The postwar period was a transformative time for African American communities in Detroit. Mass migrations of African Americans from the south and shifts in the racial boundaries between neighborhoods led to dramatic changes in the urban makeup of the city. Located at the center of one such neighborhood in Detroit’s Westside was the Blue Bird Inn, one of the most important jazz clubs in the city as well as a social hub for the community. The Blue Bird rose to prominence in the late 1940s with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaeleigh Herstad.

This presentation explores the reconfiguration of urban landscapes in postindustrial cities by discussing how materials removed from blighted neighborhoods in Detroit, Michigan, and Cleveland, Ohio, are reused and resold as tangible heritage (in the form of furniture or personal accessories), often in different parts of the same city. Mapping the transfer and reuse of building materials reveals patterns of urban change and (re)development over time and provides insight into regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael R M Kiddey.

The Homeless Heritage project (2009-2013) was a collaborative public archaeology project that sought to document contemporary homelessness from the perspective of homeless people in two British cities, Bristol and York. This paper draws on case studies from the Homeless Heritage project and expands upon a paper given at SHA 2013 (Leicester) when fieldwork was in its concluding phase. Three years on, this paper reflects upon the theoretical and methodological challenges that were present and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine J. Watson.

Established by the Canterbury Association in 1850, Christchurch, New Zealand, has long been regarded as the most English of New Zealand's cities. This sobriquet - sometimes meant positively, but often used negatively - has been based in large part on the city's appearance. Curiously, however, the validity of this assumption has never really been tested, and certainly has not been tested using archaeological data. The volume of archaeological work in Christchurch since the 2011 earthquakes - 2000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reilly.

Following Raymond Williams’ critical analysis of the relationship between the English countryside and its urban counterpart in The Country and the City (1973), this paper expands Williams’ analysis to incorporate the entanglements of the colony, specifically the Caribbean post-colony of Barbados, and English urban centers. Despite studies of well-known historical relationships existing in terms of Atlantic world economics, there has been less discussion of the repercussions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina M Foxton.

Managing the historic environments of cities is a task that continually concerns local authorities and citizens. Currently in the UK, ‘Local Plans’ for the development of cities form as documents which guide archaeologists and developers forward in the ongoing rendering of urban fabrics. On the other hand, ‘Neighbourhood Plans’ written by community groups create palpable statements of ownership for local areas and heritage.  Arguably, the city’s fabric is woven not only by building materials but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krysta Ryzewski.

Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park were constructed between 1908 and 1918 as part of Detroit’s City Beautiful Movement. The construction process was a place-making effort designed to implant order on the urban landscape that involved the displacement of a community who represented everything that city planners sought to erase from Detroit’s city center: overcrowding, poverty, immigrants, and transient populations. Current historical archaeological research reveals how the existing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Johnson. Joseph M. Bagley.

Boston is a city celebrated for its history.  With millions of heritage tourists bringing billions of dollars to the city annually, it is significant and rare for Boston to add additional attractions to its assemblage of historic sites along and around its famous Freedom Trail.  In the summer of 2015, a team of volunteers excavated one of the "lost" Freedom Trail sites, the 1645 Boston Latin School campus, exposing and expanding the sites history to visitors and residents alike.  This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessie Garland.

The volume of archaeological work undertaken in Christchurch, New Zealand, since the 2011 earthquake has uncovered a vast quantity of material culture related to the 19th century settlement and development of the city. The challenge of interpreting this material has revealed several unique opportunities to examine questions of consumption and agency in the formation of the city’s material identity. In particular, the city-wide scale of archaeological excavation in combination with a site by site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura McAtackney.

Belfast has become synonymous with the study of insidious, civil conflict; especially how ethnic, political and religious divisions are materialized and reproduced in the contemporary city. The impact of focusing on segregation and sectarianism has dominated our understandings of the fractured city leaving the issue of gender sidelined. This paper aims to examine the contemporary city through the lens of competing placemaking strategies: the official implanting of contemporary art and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sefryn Penrose.

Half of the world’s population now lives in cities. But the heritage of the city can be seen as redundant: a problem to be solved through the right planning mechanism. Urban heritage practice has barely changed for 25 years. It privileges buildings and public realm, tourism, economics. It presumes preservation of fabric. Familiar orthodoxies dominate: ‘urban grain’; ‘the right materials’. It’s western centric. Taste is policed: there is a homogeneity to ‘heritage’. But this has not been how we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa D. Bulger.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonas Nordin.

During most of the 20th century the Swedish Roma people were forced to be constantly travelling, and usually not being allowed to settle down within a municipality for more than a few weeks at a time. This changed in the mid 1960’s when the Swedish state made sure housing was found for the last members of the group still living in camps. The project "At the outskirts of the city – Swedish Roma life narratives and camp sites from the 20th Century," is based on interaction and cooperation between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Dwyer.

Mark Crinson writes of the city as a physical landscape and a collection of objects and practices that both enable recollections of the past, and embody the past through traces of the city’s sequential building and rebuilding. The homes of the people of Vauxhall, an inner-city district of Liverpool, were demolished and rebuilt in successive waves of ‘slum’ clearance during the 20th century, the latest manifestation of the area’s working-class housing being shaped by residents themselves – a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liz Anne Thomas.

‘Sailortown’ is the unofficial name given to a tiny enclave of streets, located on Clarendon Docks, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Throughout the 19th century and up to the middle of the 20th century Sailortown was a diverse community with manufacturing and maritime industries. In1969, following the downturn of Belfast’s industrial economy, plans for redevelopment of the Docklands commenced. In 2015 archaeological investigations, first of its kind in this area, focused on investigating household...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amalia Nuevo Delaunay. Javiera Letelier Cosmelli. Rodolfo Quiroz Rojas.

Cigarettes are the most numerous, ubiquitous, and tolerated form of trash on the urban landscape (Graesch & Hartshorn 2014:1). This statement has special meaning in Chile, leading country in cigarette consumption in the continent and highly ranked at a global scale. On this basis, it has became a critical public health issue.  Current approaches in the study of this phenomenon are based on interviews, but no material study has been conducted. Considering the differences between people´s...