Urban Foodways in a Multicultural Environment: Faunal Remains from Early 20th-Century Sites in Detroit, Michigan

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the first half of the 20th century, Detroit’s Paradise Valley was a community constantly in transition. The neighborhood was occupied largely by a Jewish immigrant community from the late 19th through early 20th centuries. With the Great Migration, the area became predominantly African American by the 1920s. From the 1930s-1950s it was cleared for the construction of two federal housing projects and Interstate 75. Four archaeological sites excavated after the demolition of the Frederick Douglass Homes housing project in 2013 capture a distinct snapshot of the rapidly changing cultural landscape of Detroit in the early 20th century. Each site – a Turkish Bathhouse, two multi-family residential sites (one occupied by Jewish immigrants and the other by African-Americans), and a bakery / Chinese restaurant – provides a different context through which to compare food preferences, consumption, and refuse disposal in this multicultural community through the analysis of each site’s faunal assemblages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow