Urban Poverty in Historic New Orleans: Revisiting Magnolia/C. J. Peete

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

New Orleans experienced considerable social change between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the economic participation of its residents varying widely according to race, gender, and immigrant status. In the two decades following Hurricane Katrina, federal aid disaster response and rebuilding efforts offered rare opportunities to perform archaeological data recovery in some of the more historically impoverished neighborhoods of the city. Current interpretations of assemblages obtained from such projects have largely focused on the transition toward mainstream American consumerism. In revisiting archaeological materials from the former Magnolia/C. J. Peete housing development, this research aims to move beyond these established tropes in search of additional, less visible themes related to the economic and social activities of marginalized residents in urban environments. What were the experiences of those households occupying the fringes of full societal membership, and what, if any, artifactual commonalities exist across them? This paper will explore the potential for such similarities to be transferable and, thus, also viewed as indices of socioeconomic standing when encountered in other contexts and locales.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38718.0