Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah E Platt.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1770, the Provost-Marshal of the city of Charlestown (now Charleston, SC) advertised the land of a former gunsmith as for sale in The South Carolina Gazette. The valuable lot, situated in the center of the oldest part of the city, was described as “fifty-one feet, more or less” on front and in depth “two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garrett R Fesler.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For two days in August 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, and a core group of followers rampaged across rural Southampton County, Virginia, killing some 55 white people. Broadly speaking, Turner had initiated a social justice movement, albeit a violent one. One month later, 46 free Black residents of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher N. Matthews.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Recent calls for a revival of abolition (of the police, of racism, of capitalism, of America) intentionally connect contemporary movements to the legacy of abolitionism we often associate with the fight to end slavery and institute a new society defined by not only freedom but also an unbounded existence....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aja M. Lans.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Beginning with the recent movements #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, I consider how bioarchaeology can be used to reveal the long history of violence against black women in the United States. I do so by studying the skeletal and archival remains of 79 black women who were dissected in New York City during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madison Aubey. Kellen Gold. Kelly Britt.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. While the history of mass protest can take many forms in a variety of environments, urban spaces provide an ideal location to exert dissent. Due to urban spaces’ concentration of political, economic and social power, as well as sheer density of people, they can quickly take on material and symbolic importance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura McAtackney.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Belfast is a city that has been made and remade through cycles of violence in its 400-year history. This has been through both conscious and unconscious means, from bombings and riots to the forced movement of communities into newly environments. The material memory of conflict is retrievable in various forms in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin A. Skolnik. Samantha J. Lee.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 1828 until its liberation at the onset of the American Civil War in 1861, the slave jail complex built by Franklin & Armfield at 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia facilitated a fundamental transformation in American slavery. It was used to industrialize the domestic slave trade; however, it also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Niculescu.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Dissent over what merits preservation and what constitutes progress undergird Alexandria Archaeology’s establishment. Our program is rooted in the urban renewal movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In demolishing several blocks and removing people of color and poor whites from the City’s downtown, officials hoped to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca S. Graff.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Jimmy Blythe wrote “Mecca Flat Blues” in 1924, capturing the centrality of the building’s South Side neighborhood to Chicago’s Black community and jazz scene. Constructed in 1892 as an exemplar of courtyard-style urban living, the Mecca began as a failed hotel for the 1893 World’s Fair. Transformed into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timo Ylimaunu. Sirpa Aalto. Paul R. Mullins.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The young independent Finland created its national narrative through different kind of statues and memorials after the independence 1917. Some memorials and statues were unveiled to commemorate some 300 years old conflicts and historical figures, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. The so-called Club War...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Lorin Brace VI.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As monuments celebrating the Confederacy have come down in cities across the country in recent months, following the protests sparked by the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and numerous other Black Americans, debates have raged over the country’s legacies of slavery and racism. Some argue that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna S. Agbe-Davies.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The second decade of the 20th century saw a Great Migration of African Americans to cities like Chicago. The city’s existing African American community expressed concern for the welfare of “our girls” in a strange, potentially dangerous, new place, and worked to ease their transition to a new way of life. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer A. Lupu.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As the nation’s capital, Washington, DC was designed and governed as an intended ideological model for the nation. In this paper, I contextualize and explore the history of Washington, from its initial plan, which sought to use elevation and lines of sight to center built symbols of democratic governance,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nkem Michell Ike.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Many urban centers bear the scars of anti-Black violence and race massacres. Predominately Black spaces have been especially susceptible to various forms of racial unrest at the hands of their white counterparts. Massacres such as those in the Snowtown neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island in 1831 and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Bernard Marcoux. Martha Zierden.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The recent removal of a towering statue of John C. Calhoun has brought much attention to the open park known known as Marion Square in Charleston, South Carolina. Historical and archaeological research demonstrates that the removal, and the protests that led to this event are just the latest instances of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Gardner.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines how (post)industrial spaces become labelled as disused ‘wastelands’, or ‘brownfields’ in processes of urban redevelopment. Taking a broad overview of different examples across sites in Edinburgh and London (UK) I ask how understandings of waste and value are produced and contested through...