Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change," at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Events of the past year have brought into sharp relief the role of cities as spaces of friction, where conflicting ideologies and worldviews are brought into close contact and long-standing vexations often explode into social movements of dissent, action, and subsequent change. The names of metropolitan centers often become referents to moments of intense injustice- such as Ferguson (the murder of Michael Brown), Hong Kong (infringements on sovereignty from China), Charlottesville (Unite the Right Rally), and Flint (tainted water crisis). These phenomena are hardly isolated to the present- historically moments of great upheaval have begun in cities- for example the Boston Massacre in 1770, the 1811-1813 Luddite Rebellion in Nottingham, UK, and the massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1921. The session organizers invite participants to explore cities, however culturally defined, as sites of dissonance and dissent through time. International archaeologies of the past and the contemporary are both encouraged.