The Bronx is Up and the Battery’s Brown: Urban Archaeology on Contaminated Sites

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.

While the presence of soil contamination is not unique to urban archaeological sites, the density of industrial and residential development in cities often results in the contamination of archaeologically sensitive soils. In New York City in recent years, archaeologists have excavated within Brownfield and Superfund sites and other sites contaminated with petroleum, diesel oil, mercury, lead, and other materials that pose hazards to human health. While environmental professionals are trained and equipped for working within contaminated soils, archaeologists rarely have sufficient training or expertise to safely work in contaminated areas or with contaminated artifacts. This paper will describe recent work on several contaminated sites and outline the need for greater training for archaeologists and a need for standardized protocols for working with hazardous materials and decontaminating archaeological artifacts and samples -including human remains and porous artifacts- to ensure that archaeologists are not harmed in the field or in the lab.

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