Nan Rothschild

• Columbia University

In all colonial contexts, gender roles were a crucial, heavily negotiated component of interaction. In the Spanish Americas, these negotiations were particularly contentious for women because perspectives on the importance of women were so different. In the American Southwest, for example, Pueblo women were powerful, significant figures in their ma...

Dutch women in seventeenth century New Amsterdam/New York were often expected to participate in important economic affairs. This paper considers two such women: Alida Schuyler van Rensselaer Livingston and Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer. Each had a significant role as a trader and manager of property. However, they were quite different in that...

This chapter considers the experiences of the authors as regards the relevance of archaeological research in an academic setting. Comparing their careers, the authors discuss both the opportunities and constraints that they have experienced in academia (including the relationship of academia to industry), consider their primary considerations – and...

Before Albany: An Archaeology of Native Dutch Relations in the Capital Region 1600-1664. Bradley James W. . 2007. New York State Museum Bulletin No. 509. University of the State of New York, State Education Department, Albany, xvii + 230 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN-10 1-55557-238-3. - Volume 74 Issue 3 - Nan A. Rothschild

Over the last few decades, archaeologists have begun to study the archaeologies of their cities during the modern period. Here, we discuss the archaeologies of some of the modern cities of Britain and her former colonies. We cover the history of such projects, how and why they are done, and, finally, some of the topics that urban archaeologists hav...

San Jose de las Huertas was established as a land grant community by the Spanish crown in 1765 and occupied for about 60 years. Many of its residents returned to the area after a brief respite, to found the village of Placitas, which exists today. Archaeological excavation at Las Huertas, documentary research and oral history from descendants of th...

African Americans in antebellum New York City followed several different residence strategies in the face of ongoing discrimination. Most lived in enclaves, dispersed throughout poorer neighborhoods that were by no means primarily black. One such enclave was Little Africa. Some lived separately in places like Seneca Village, an African American com...

Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas. eds. New York: Routledge, 2001. 208 pp.

In situations of contact between two peoples, such as those intertwined in a colonial encounter, one of the most important aspects of interaction is the congruence of their spaces. Spatial interactions are crucial in colonial settings because the social relations of power are diffused through space and exerted in places where people come together....

A comparison of two seventeenth-century colonial encounters in North America, examining the Pueblo–Spanish interaction in New Mexico and the Mohawk–Dutch situation in New York. I focus on material culture flows, the role of women, forms of labor that were extracted in each setting and how each of these contributed to power relations and identity co...

The way people organize living spaces defines and is defined by all aspects of their lives - social, political, economic and ritual. People meaningfully produce, use and experience living spaces. This calls for social and historical analyses of space as actually lived. By exploring notions of lived or living spaces we attempt to take up the idea of...

Seneca Village was an African American - Irish village located in what is now New York City's Central Park. As part of the construction of Central Park the village was razed in the 1850s and no surficial remnants remain. Increasing interest in the history of Seneca Village led to an effort to use a combination of geophysics, archeology and GIS to l...

Much of what appears as variation between faunal deposits may be the result of a number of different factors, each with their own effects. This article attempts to delineate some of these factors and their effects, so that distinctions among them may ultimately be made. The data used come from three sites in lower Manhattan. A method of assessing f...

The locational patterning of households in New York City in the 18th and early 19th century is analyzed to observe the spatial effect of bonds of kinship, ethnicity, and occupation. All of these factors are found significant but they vary in the timing and strength of their importance, and all are attenuated as the city enlarges, land becomes a com...

Presents the preliminary analysis of a series of historic-period faunal assemblages from two different parts of North America, in terms of the effect of increasing urbanization on that part of the diet seen in faunal material. A comparison between two measures of diversity, the Simpson and the Shannon-Weaver measures, shows them to be, for the most...

In this comparative study of colonial tavern sites, it is suggested that these sites fulfilled a variety of functions, conditioned in part by the degree of urbanization of their settings. Four sites, two in urban areas and two in rural areas, are compared by means of a Brainerd-Robinson Coefficient of Agreement, showing a clear urban-rural differen...

Cities are the most complex form of environment yet developed by humans, and this complexity has many ramifications for archaeologists conducting projects in urban areas. This chapter discusses several attributes characterizing urban entities as archaeological sites and describes the impact of these attributes on various aspects of an urban archaeo...

This chapter provides an overview of pennies from Denver. As for the pennies made in Denver and San Francisco, they are more frequent in some samples than others, with the range from 7–27.5%, combining both western mints. The distribution of Denver pennies does not follow the same pattern as the distribution of plain (Philadelphia) pennies, with th...

Excavations at the site of an 18th century rural residence in Queens County, New York, have yielded information about changing patterns of land use?from agricultural, to suburban, to industrial?in the New York metropolitan region. Comparison of quantitative data about some classes of specimens from this site with similar information from the Clinto...

Two prehistoric mortuary sites, one from the Archaic and one from the Mississippian period, are compared with regard to the importance of age and sex as status-bearing variables. Statements about social organization in the two societies are examined using mortuary data, specifically, grave-good inclusions with burials. Cluster analyses at Indian Kn...

Also on film. Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School.