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

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in 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 session brings together an international group of practitioners to reflect upon the current state of urban archaeology for the purposes of identifying new/renewed directions in scholarship, advancing community-involved initiatives, and addressing issues of city planning and heritage management. Since the 2021 SHA conference held during the COVID-19 pandemic, urban archaeologists in the United States and beyond have begun to revive the Urban Archaeology Working Group, (first established in the 1980s), as a space for collaboration and problem-solving within the scope of these concerns. This session, sponsored by the Urban Archaeology Working Group, is a space to showcase current scholarship and other archaeological interventions in urban spaces and places, concluding with a period for discussion and collaboration between participants and audience members. The organizers invite papers that ignite conversation across municipal (and disciplinary) boundaries and explore recent advances in international research in the archaeology of, within, and for cities.