Legacy and Influences of a Gotham Archaeologist: Papers in Honor of Diana diZerega Wall
Other Keywords
class •
New York City •
Gender •
Ethnicity •
Creamware •
Collections •
Race •
Households •
Patent Medicine •
Slavery
Temporal Keywords
Nineteenth Century •
Early 19th Century •
20th Century •
19th Century •
18th/19th century •
19th C •
pre- and post-contact
Geographic Keywords
North America •
Coahuila (State / Territory) •
New Mexico (State / Territory) •
Oklahoma (State / Territory) •
Arizona (State / Territory) •
Texas (State / Territory) •
Sonora (State / Territory) •
United States of America (Country) •
Chihuahua (State / Territory) •
Nuevo Leon (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
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Communities in Conflict: Racialized Violence During Gradual Emancipation on Long Island (2016)
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From New Amsterdam to Seneca Village, Diana diZerega Wall has examined the often-conflicting interactions of communities living in close relation. In the early nineteenth century, the nearly 30-year process of Gradual Emancipation slowly dismantled the system of slavery in New York State, but it also created the conditions for the perpetuation of inequality among closely intertwined peoples: the black and white inhabitants of eastern Long Island. Inspired by Wall’s ability to uncover the...
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Defining Historical Archaeology in New York City: New Terms, New Archaeology (2016)
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Historical Archaeology was in its early stages as Diana diZerega Wall and her cohort, lead by Bert Salwen at NYU, began to excavate in New York City. Here I will discuss how the use terms like gender, class, and race were revolutionary at the time and how they have allowed us to investigate further subtleties such as the dialectic relationship between insider and outsider communities. Wall and her cohort have taught us to work with local descendant communities, bridged the gap between academia...
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Examining Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century New York City through Patent Medicines (2016)
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Patent medicines were immensely popular in the 19th century. They promised astounding cures, were unregulated and relatively inexpensive, and permitted individuals to self-medicate without an interfering physician. Archaeologists have often begun their interpretations of these curious commodities with the premises that they were lesser quality alternatives to physicians’ prescriptions and thus more appealing to poorer alienated groups (who used them passively as advertised) than to the...
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Exploring Racial Formation in Early 19th Century New York City (2016)
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This paper explores racial formation in New York City from 1799 to 1863, when the city had the largest free Black population in the North, and ends with the 1863 Draft Riots, which marked a major turning point in the relationship between the city’s Black and Irish communities. Using the optic of historical archaeology, Diana Wall’s work is critical to this analysis of racial formation in New York City. By unearthing the city's complex racial history while guiding a significant number of...
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"Old" Collections, New Narrative: Rethinking the Native Past through Archaeological Collections from Eastern Long Island. (2016)
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This paper highlights the value of existing museum and contract archaeology collections to new directions in archaeological research. Renewed attention to "old" data sets serves to decolonize archaeology and to challenge existing narratives with new questions. The collections discussed in this paper all come from eastern Long Island, New York. I draw attention to how narratives of Native American cultural loss and disappearance are constructed locally through archaeological heritage, and I...
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Search for a Seamless Narrative: Thoughts on Engaging the General Public Through Writing and Other Means (2016)
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Diana diZerega Wall has a distinguished career in Archaeology working as a pioneer in large-scale urban excavations, as a museum curator, and as a university professor. In each of these endeavors, she has made it a priority to bring the major implications of her scholarship, and that of archaeology itself, to a wide array of general audiences. Much of this has been done by analyzing, with a contemporary eye, huge amounts of archaeological and historical data, collected for various reasons and...
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Sexuality in the (Nineteenth-Century) City: Practicing Class in Gotham’s Bedrooms (2016)
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Sexuality provides a powerful mechanism for patrolling the boundaries of socially constructed communities. Imagined as a natural expression of basic human behavior, sexuality naturalizes social boundaries and marks them as immutable. In the Nineteenth Century, the medical ills of the "overly-civilized" were identified as having a sexual basis. Hysteria was given an etiology of too frequent sexual activity. Education or business would interfere with the proper development of the uterus. For...
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‘Success to America.’ The Role of British Creamware in the Production of American National Identity. (2016)
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Excavations at New York City’s South Street Seaport uncovered an early nineteenth century deposit within the foundation of a small building on the property of a wealthy merchant. Among the artifacts in the deposit was a creamware plate that paid homage to the "sacred" memory of George Washington. Along with this solemn memorial, the imagery on the plate included a neoclassic goddess waving an olive branch towards a mercantile ship on the horizon. Despite the irony, British potters produced many...
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Thinking About Urban Approaches to Interpreting Class in the 19thC: Labor, Residence and Economic Choice at Rock Hall, Lawrence, NY. (2016)
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During the first half of 19th C, dramatic economic changes are evident at the household level. Straddling the urban-suburban divide, residents of Rock Hall on the South Shore of Long Island hybridized farming and summer tourism as they sought to improve their family’s position. A microcosm of economic choices, this household combined labor and residence in ways that used, and rendered them beholden to, the urban juggernaut of the City while remaining rooted in a distinct local economic...
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"Where Slavery Died Hard:" The Forgotten History of Ulster County, New York (2016)
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Diana Wall has inspired our interest in archaeological and historical aspects of African-Americans and women in eighteenth and nineteenth-century America. Using various primary sources we have been exploring the experiences of enslaved men, women and children in Ulster County, New York, informed in part by accounts of the life of one of the most famous women in American history, Sojourner Truth, a renowned abolitionist, feminist and orator, who was born and raised a slave here in the 1790s....