Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages," at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Urban sites have fascinated archaeologists for decades, if no other reason than cities produce both an abundance and diversity of material culture. Cities also are in the business of building, which can be a motor for a great deal of archaeological research as new construction exposes buried archaeological deposits. While this is a very productive approach for archaeology, this session considers another way to think archaeologically about the urban process. Instead of looking stratigraphically at what was buried in the past and later exposed by new works, we look at the urban landscape as a contested memorial assemblage to see what was erased in the making of modern cities and how and why these spaces and structures became dispensable. The main question is what the removal of sites in the past and present means for understanding cities and the people who live in them today.