The Embedded Landscapes of 28 Dock Street: Materiality, Mobility, and Enslavement in 18th-Century New York City

Summary

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. The product of a global economy, the crucibles operated at the nexus of multiple intersecting racial, religious, and social identities that constituted the Dock Street household and contemporaneous New York. Utilizing Bernard Herman’s concept of embedded landscapes that amplifies definitions of place to include “mutual interests,” this paper will examine the materiality of the crucibles within a dynamic urban context, and the multiple subjectivities of their use as informed by enslavement, craft and labor, diaspora, and mobility while highlighting the research value of extant collections as knowledge expands and perspectives shift.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow