HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY最新文献

Nikhil Anand (2020:50), in a discussion of the modernization of water systems in Mumbai, conceptualizes urban infrastructure as a network of “political assemblages” that can be deconstructed to understand how power is articulated within spaces. Following Anand, we analyze the technopolitics of utility infrastructure and waste disposal in the New Orleans neighborhood that became Storyville, the city’s famed red-light district (1897–1917). Storyville, as a byproduct of the city’s Progressive Era efforts to engineer physically and morally salubrious urban spaces, was built on an inherent contradiction: it attempted to racially segregate social space, even as it also reserved sex across the color line as a privilege of white men. The material record helps to demonstrate the dissonance between the facades of the imagined Storyville and the diversity of everyday life there, even as that dissonance has reverberated through cycles of urban redevelopment in the neighborhood during the century since the district closed.

The early 20th century was a period rife with racial and anti-Black violence that impacted every corner of the United States. Recent archaeological studies have been undertaken to understand these sites of violence; however, more work needs to be done. This article, focusing on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its 2021 centennial, shines a light on how survivors, descendants, and stakeholders shape these events by using memory, the landscape, and archaeology as tools to tell their own stories in the past and present.

This article traces the life and death of two wolves that perished at the hands of 18th-century settlers in the small agropastoral community of San Antonio del Embudo in what is today northern New Mexico. Through a study of their interred remains, we examine how wolves became entangled in the unfolding negotiations between settler and Indigenous communities in the American West, playing varied ecological, political, and symbolic roles. In the process, we advance two wider arguments: first, that the archaeology of settler colonialism would do well to adopt a multispecies perspective in which nonhuman animals are counted among both the colonizers and the colonized, and second, that doing so requires a new mode of historical narration focused on the experiences of individual nonhumans as opposed to the anonymous, animalistic mass.

The majority of Boston’s residents are minorities. These minority residents confront the ongoing effects of racism, including the “hard histories” of enslavement, the civil-rights movement, and community displacement. Some white Bostonians are unaware of these hard histories or see them as an unnecessary and uncomfortable politicizing of the past, while others are aware, but not personally impacted. Public community cultural-resource management archaeological surveys by Boston’s City Archaeology Program seek to confront these hard histories through recent surveys in Boston’s Chinatown, the Boston Latin School site, and the Malcolm X-Ella Little-Collins House. The hard and often entangled histories encountered at these sites challenge public perceptions of archaeology by seeking extensive public engagement through community archaeology. This article explores the economic and social issues created by the hard histories at these sites through the reflections of individuals both personally and professionally connected to these community archaeological surveys.

In decades since 11 September 2001 (9/11), surveillance and policing within the United States have increased manifold and, with them, protests against the systemic racism and classism embedded in these practices. These practices go back beyond the 21st century—these modes of policing, power, and protests against them are not new. Due to urban spaces’ concentration of political, economic, and social power and the sheer density of people, they can quickly take on material and symbolic importance that can last for centuries. As public protests increase, so do countermeasures from those wielding power in the forms of both formal and informal policing and surveillance. These policing measures also leave material traces in the landscape, working to create a palimpsest of trauma across urban terrains. The lineage of a surveillance landscape as seen in policing, power, and protest in Lower Manhattan, will be explored through a documentary archaeological approach to examine the residual trauma left in public spaces.

The second decade of the 20th century saw the beginning of the Great Migration of African Americans to cities such as Chicago. The city’s existing African American community expressed concern for the welfare of girls and women coming to a strange, potentially dangerous, new place and worked to ease their transition to life there. This article employs a “documentary archaeology” approach, using texts from the period to understand material conditions experienced by members of “the Race,” especially women, in Chicago ca. 1920. It includes a special emphasis on space, how people moved through it, and how it was used in struggles for domination and equality. A rumored spatial transgression was the spark for Chicago’s “riot” of 1919. During the violence, Black spaces were decimated. The events, including many deaths, were so shocking that a commission was established at the time to study the Great Migration and its consequences for Chicago. That commission’s report is at the center of the archive consulted for the analysis presented here. Reflecting the ideologies of the era, its analyses emphasized race over gender as a determining factor in the life experiences of female members of the Race. I argue that the spatial distribution of racialized risk was different for women than for men, and, furthermore, that the dangers women faced were chronic rather than acute.

In this article, I undertake an archaeology of urban “wastelands.” In doing so I ask how such places are materially and conceptually “made” and examine the effects that such labeling has on how postindustrial urban sites are used and valued. Taking examples from the capital cities of England and Scotland (London and Edinburgh), I show that the meaning of “waste” at such sites is temporally and socially contingent. Establishing certainty between which landscapes are “wasted” and which are not can prove difficult, and, in some cases, archaeologists themselves may be implicated in labeling and then “cleansing” wastelands, with archaeology operating as a form of waste management. While wastelands may appear as dissonant and associated with negativity or decay at first glance, I show that these places can also facilitate surprisingly generative and creative uses and provide new forms of heritage value.

From 1828 until its liberation at the outset of the American Civil War in 1861, the slave-jail complex built by the domestic slave-trading firm of Franklin & Armfield at 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia, facilitated a fundamental transformation in American slavery. It was used to industrialize the domestic slave trade; however, it also witnessed moments of agency and power, as individuals negotiated oppressive legal, social, and economic systems. These systems were not static, and when these supporting frameworks were disrupted in moments of change, existing tensions and contradictions erupted. As the site was transformed from a slave jail to a military prison and then again as the war ended, the systems that supported slavery and white supremacy were laid bare in moments of tension before retreating to take on new forms. As the City of Alexandria transforms this site into a museum, we confront these tensions in the present.

For two days in August 1831, an enslaved preacher named Nathaniel Turner and a core group of followers rampaged across rural Southampton County, Virginia, killing some 55 white people. One month later, 46 free Black residents of Alexandria, Virginia, published a petition in the local newspaper, asserting their loyalty to the town. What compelled these 46 men to do this? I explore the connections among the petitioners as well as 238 other free Blacks in Alexandria in 1831, focusing on the concepts of social dissonance and stability. I propose that free Black Alexandrians mitigated the discord in their lives by forming neighborhoods, buying property, putting down roots, and establishing a favorable reputation within the white community. I conduct a documentary archaeology of primary sources to investigate the ways that free Blacks tempered the daily onslaught of racist disruption in their lives, particularly for the period ca. 1829–1833.

Hamtramck, a small, century-old city completely enveloped by Detroit, is promoted by its leadership as “the world in 2.1 square miles.” This slogan invokes two inextricable facets of the city’s heritage and contemporary identity: Hamtramck’s longstanding reputation as a proud, working-class city that has always been welcoming to immigrants, and its significance as the former home of automotive manufacturer Dodge Main, whose operations between 1910 and 1979 positioned the city as a global industrial powerhouse. The Old Hamtramck Center Project combines historical, archaeological, and geospatial sources of data to examine the process of urban expansion in the new city, which included the dissonant relationships among local communities and the built environment. Archaeological investigations within Old Hamtramck Center consider how the city’s residents experienced the often inconsistent circumstances of rapid urbanization and civic organization as the rural village transformed into a crowded industrial city during the early 20th century.