Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Cities are complex places that pose many challenges and opportunities for archaeologists. These characteristically large, dense, and permanent settlements contain layers of occupation that bear traces of the diversity of people and activities that they attract and cultivate. Since 1500 C.E., innovations in transportation technology and industrialization have made urban centers even more complicated, heterogeneous, and, at the same time, global and interconnected. This session brings together archaeologists working in cities on at least four continents to discuss and compare their approaches and insights. Papers will center on urban ecosystems and landscapes—defined broadly to include the social, cultural, political, economic, and physical—and on how attention to material remains reveals important information and generates meaningful questions about urban life in the past, especially about marginalized groups or individuals, that would not be possible using documents alone.

Site Name Keywords
Old sector of San Victorino in Bogota

Site Type Keywords
Industrial Building • Contemporany Archeology

Other Keywords
Colonialism • Urban • Landscape • water • Trade • Material Culture • Collections • Race • Infrastructure • Mobility

Culture Keywords
Historic • contemporany

Investigation Types
Archaeological Overview

Material Types
Building Materials

Temporal Keywords
19th - early 20th centuries

Geographic Keywords
South America (Continent) • Republic of Colombia (Country) • Distrito Especial (State / Territory) • Victoria (State / Territory) • Tasmania (State / Territory) • Australian Capital Territory (State / Territory) • North America • Distrito Federal (State / Territory) • Republic of Bolivia (Country) • Darien (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)

  • Documents (11)
Documents
  • Archaeology of Urban Slavery In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tania Andrade Lima.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Until recently the archaeology of the African diaspora in the Americas had focused its attention primarily on the plantations. Research conducted in urban areas, however, has shown the wealth of information extractable from city subsoils. As one of the most important ports of entry of Africans during...

  • Are We (or Should We) be Still be "Putting the "There" There?" (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nigel Jeffries.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Nearly 20 years have passed since a raft of foundational and influential studies on urban archaeology on 19th–century cities from the United States and Australia were published. Many of the individuals involved in these works where drawn together and present at a meeting in 2008 at the University of...

  • "Big Data" in the Nation’s Capital: Statistics and Storytelling with Washington, DC’s Archaeological Collections (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer A Lupu.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Known as the “Federal City,” Washington, DC has undergone extensive archaeological excavation and analysis, in part due to American law that requires pre-construction testing for federal government-related construction projects. However, this wealth of data is understudied and rarely revisited after...

  • Commerce With The Colonies: Supplying Domestic Commodities In The City Of Christchurch, New Zealand, 1850-1900 (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessie Garland.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Nineteenth-century British colonial cities existed both within a global landscape of British colonialism, characterised by an exported, shared British ‘colonial’ culture, and as urban entities within which locally distinct identities and communities developed. The scale of archaeological work in...

  • Complicating the Rural to Urban Hypothesis Among Irish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith B. Linn.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Historians have long noted that the majority of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine (1845-1852) came from rural areas in Ireland and, surprisingly, settled in American cities, quickly becoming an urbanized population. Explanations for this phenomenon have centered on social factors, which are...

  • Contemporary Archeology And Urban Ruins: Urban Development Of The Western Sector Of The City of Bogota Between The 19th And 20th Centuries (2023)
    DOCUMENT Full-Text Gabriela Caro.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From the archaeological study and enhancement of "urban ruin", understood as an interpretive tool for the assessment of recent materiality, a disordered and poorly defined range of traces of the industrialization process and its consequences can be involved to account for the particularities of the...

  • The Embedded Landscapes of 28 Dock Street: Materiality, Mobility, and Enslavement in 18th-Century New York City (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Striebel MacLean.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. An assemblage of small triangular-mouthed Hessian crucibles was disposed of in a cellar midden at 28 Dock Street in Lower Manhattan circa 1724. The Dock Street dwelling was associated with the home and workshop of a Huguenot silversmith and family, his Huguenot apprentice, and an enslaved black man....

  • Garden Sacrifice: Making Sense of Changing Livelihoods In Late-19th Century Bogotá (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Felipe Gaitan-Ammann. Daniela Trujillo-Hassan. Andrés Sarabia.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The second half of the 19th century was an unstable period in the history of Colombia. In cities such as Bogotá, drastic political and economic reforms, inspired by radical interpretations of liberal values, allowed some privileged urban sectors to connect with global networks of production and...

  • The Landscape of Black New Yorkers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nan A Rothschild. Diana Wall.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The landscapes of mid 19th-century Black New Yorkers in Manhattan seem to have formed in different patterns. Some people lived in segregated communities a short distance from the densely settled town (e.g., Seneca Village). Others were dispersed in the poorer part of the city among the white working...

  • Unearthing Complex Urban Landscapes in Colonial Australia: The Parramatta Light Rail Project (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Penny Crook. Abi Cryerhall. Eleanor C. Casella.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2020, a series of excavations by Sydney-based consultants GML Heritage followed the route of a new light railway system cutting its way through Parramatta: the second oldest city in British-occupied Australia. These works revealed a series of sites comprising military barracks, a commercial wharf,...

  • Water Infrastructure As An Archaeological Urban Landscape (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Monika I. Therrien.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Water is undoubtedly an essential element for human life. In cities, it creates and configures an infrastructure that involves nature, networks, materials, discourses, and trades, for its use and disposal. This conference will approach the analysis of the archaeological landscape constituted by the...