Engaging Urban Audiences in Envisioning the Past

Summary

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 and erasure, constant noise and change, competing interests, diverse communities, increasing absorption in digital worlds, and more – makes the important work of teaching about the past especially challenging. This paper presents two projects that have successfully engaged urban audiences in imagining life during earlier times from fragments that remain, a valuable but underappreciated skill archaeologists possess and can teach others. Both projects, one linking industrial design and artifact assemblages from the NYC Archaeological Repository and the other about Seneca Village, engage multiple senses and invite audiences to think like archaeologists and materialize aspects of the city's past in their mind’s eye.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow