Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Julison. Sarah Pounders. Ana Saenz.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Femme Beings Project, established by the authors in 2024, is a collective of scholars from Wayne State University in Detroit-area heritage institutions. The project investigates women’s experiences as sex workers and the conditions they lived under in the Detroit area between 1830 and 1930 by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth D. Meade.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. While the presence of soil contamination is not unique to urban archaeological sites, the density of industrial and residential development in cities often results in the contamination of archaeologically sensitive soils. In New York City in recent years, archaeologists have excavated within Brownfield...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Breen. Kelly M. Britt. Sarah E. Platt.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 1980s, a working group of urban archaeologists organized within the Society for Historical Archaeology to survey the state of the field, compile enabling legislation and program information, highlight important research emerging from cities, and discuss the challenges posed by this environment. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura McAtackney.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will explore how the pre-existing structure of Belfast has shaped and materialized an uncertain peace in the quarter of a century since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. While there are many academic studies of wall murals – and a more limited number of studies of memorials –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn A Cross. Tameshia S Rudd-Ridge. Jourdan A Brunson. Dolores B Rodgers.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas was once home to a thriving Freedmen’s Town. Established on the outskirts of elite, white Oak Cliff in the 1880s, over time the Freedmen’s Town grew to encompass hundreds of residences, community anchors, and businesses. However, by the mid-20th century, the city...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah H Mollin-Kling.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Community-engagement is an obligatory element for many practitioners intent on fostering a 21st century, ethical archaeology. However, community-engagement as a term and a practice remains ill-defined, with as many experiences with and constraints on as there are projects. In large part, this is due to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning. Stephen Mrozowski.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Drawing from decades of archaeological research in the industrial city of Lowell, as well as a recent excavation in the heart of Lowell's 19th century Irish enclave, we consider practicalities, ethical challenges, and research insights from these urban excavations. A recently completed project at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca S. Graff.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Chicago’s cultural heritage is dominated by architectural preservation organizations and supported by an architourism industry that celebrates extant works by famous architects like Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Current archaeological research in Chicago in collaboration with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith B. Linn. Jessica Striebel MacLean.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Many cities throughout the world actively engage with their history, but there are also many that focus almost exclusively on their present and future. New York City is preeminent among the latter. This inattention to the past combined with other aspects of urban life – the relentless pace of development...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camille Westmont.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Recent scholarship on modern-era forced prison labor has called upon archaeologists to consider places of convict labor holistically, including developing projects that examine sites related to the prisoners’ housing, punishment, and administration; sites related to prison guards; and sites constructed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krysta Ryzewski. Don Lafreniere. Dan Trepal. Greg Kowalski.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Hamtramck is a small Muslim-majority city surrounded by Detroit and defined by its century-long reputation as a welcoming home for foreign-born immigrants, who comprise over 40% of the city’s present-day population. The Hamtramck Explorer deep map is an outcome of the Hamtramck Spatial Archaeology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine M. Sims. Andrea P. White.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Over the last six years, the City of St. Augustine has experienced increased urbanization and a growing tourism industry while simultaneously facing climate change realities. New construction projects on private property aim to fight flooding by complying with new building codes and stormwater retention...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark S. Warner.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The archaeology of cities is a well-known theme in historical archaeology. In many regards urban archaeology is the hallmark of the discipline. Relatively unexamined, however, is the issue of what constitutes "urban." A major archaeological project in Sandpoint, Idaho provides an opportunity to examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Watson. Jessie Garland. Hayden Cawte.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Christchurch Archaeology Project was established to preserve, share and research the archaeology of Ōtautahi Christchurch, a city founded by English colonial settlers in 1850. A key part of our vision is to make the wealth of archaeological data recovered following the 2011 earthquake accessible to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Entin.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. A Jewish ritual bath, or mikveh (plural mikva’ot), is one of the most prolific Jewish archaeological features. Due to its essential role in religious life, constructing a mikveh is one of the first projects undertaken when a Jewish community is established. Yet, historical mikva’ot have received less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith D Hardy.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 2015 until 2022, the National Park Service’s Christiansted National Historic Site and the Southeast Archeological Center, as part of the Slave Wrecks Project, conducted a multi-year community archeology program in downtown Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands that combined underwater and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah E Platt.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The city of Charleston, South Carolina retains a remarkably well-preserved archaeological landscape spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The peninsular city became the administrative center of the colony of Carolina in 1680, and emerged as one of the most critical urban centers in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alanna L. Warner-Smith.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Urban skeletal assemblages have been intensely studied, as bioarchaeologists examine relations between environments and health. At the same time, urban sites pose significant challenges, as traditional bioarchaeological methods require that peoples with diverse itineraries be “pinned down” for analysis....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Trocolli.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Urban archaeology requires theory and methods tailored to densely-developed urban settings and the flexibility to apply to hyper-local conditions. Washington, DC’s archaeology guidelines are 25 years old and in dire need of updating to encompass current methods and technologies -such as GIS, and remote...