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Introduction: Becoming New York: The Five Points neighborhood
... The case study methodology draws on Mayne and Lawrence's 'Ethnography of Place' approach (Mayne and Lawrence 1998;Mayne and Lawrence 1999), with Yamin's 'inside out' approach to historical narratives (Yamin 2001a), to create a picture of waterside community life, focusing on this particular community's experience of landscape change. Through these case studies I aim to provide an insight into how the waterside communities changed socially and economically as a result of the landscape changes in addition to the ways in which they managed and reacted to the changing waterfront. ...
... Rebecca Yamin has long advocated the use of Henry Glassie's 'Inside-Out' approach to ethnographic study, where narratives are told by communities themselves, and link material culture to oral history, folklore, and folklife (Yamin 2001a, Glassie 1982. In an archaeological context, Yamin has used this approach to weave narratives which are founded on archaeological material culture and spaces, and build upon data with documentary, pictorial and oral histories, and a level of literary imagination. ...
Victorian London saw dramatic physical changes along the river Thames. Large enclosed Docks and Thames Embankments were constructed as the city struggled to cope with its ballooning population and prospering shipping industry. Whilst the Thames Embankments have been hailed as engineering triumphs, the fate of those whose livelihood relied on access to the river in central London (such as wharf workers, barge, ferry and lighter men, and others) is unknown. In order to investigate the impact of the Embankment, a methodology has been developed which enables characterisation of a large swathe of urban riverside throughout the mid- to late 19th century, whilst also ensuring that the stories of individuals and communities are not lost. The approach combines and adapts established methodologies, such as Historic Landscape/Seascape Characterisation and Maritime Cultural Landscapes, to understand the nature and changes in the urban riverside landscape. This methodology forms the background for detailed research on smaller sites, such as a single street, housing block, or industrial site, in order to create ‘Ethnographies of Place’. These small-scale ‘Ethnographies’ have the potential to tell stories about how the social and economic circumstances of individuals and communities changed as a result of the landscape changes associated with the Embankment construction. This paper presents the initial work to establish the methodology and preliminary conclusions based on key sources.
... These small studies serve to create more personalised perspectives of the landscape change, and provide a way of investigating how the embankment construction might have been experienced by the riverside residents. The construction of these individual narratives uses methods advocated by Mayne and Lawrence (1998) and Yamin (2001) in their respective 'ethnography of place' and 'inside out' approaches. Early work with the census records has identified lightermen living locally and a number of families living within the riverside houses that were demolished as part of the embankment construction works. ...
... The excavation of urban, Industrial Period, workers' housing was pioneered in several places during the late twentieth century: in New York in the USA and Sydney in Australia for instance (Yamin 2001;Karskens 2001). In Britain, the archaeological investigation of workers' housing only became widely practised after 1990, when UK planning guidance required developers to fund archaeological work ahead of redevelopment. ...
This chapter focuses on the archaeological and standing buildings evidence for industrial housing directly associated with industry and urbanization in Britain during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Such housing was a necessary counterpart to the urban, steam-powered factory. Industrial housing encompasses many building types, the primary ones being blind-backs, back-to-backs, court houses, through-houses, tenements, and workshop dwellings. This chapter provides an overview of archaeological work on workers’ housing since the 1990s in Britain. Excavated examples of housing from Birmingham, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Sheffield, and York are discussed, which show how archaeological evidence can throw light on the issues of legislation, household groups and mobility, overcrowding, build quality, sanitation, and disease.
... Scholarship on migration to New York in the nineteenth century is well-established across the humanities and social sciences. Irish migrants have received particular attention, especially in historical archaeology where the remains of neighborhoods and streets in areas like Five Points have turned up domestic assemblages pointing to material markers of identity (Yamin 2001). Recent research in the history of medicine has tackled the issue of over-representation of Irish migrants in lunatic asylums and other institutions. ...
This paper maps and spatializes the Almshouse Ledger records for the children of unmarried parents in New York City in the 1820 and 1830s. Mapping the distribution of poverty and the provision of forms of welfare in the city, this paper illustrates specific areas of the city which were attracting the very poor as early as the second decade of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that migrants from countries with similar welfare systems to those established in New York may be overrepresented in the record due to familiarity with the system. This interdisciplinary paper combines archaeological approaches to GIS with archival research to illustrate the distribution of welfare provision.
... Most studies of Jews by North American archaeologists have been done in a cultural resource management (CRM) context rather than as scholarly research although the results are frequently of high quality (e.g., Yamin 2001). Typically, a discovery would be made during legally mandated pre-construction archaeological testing or during construction itself. ...
This article shows how archaeology contributes to our understanding of life in the nineteenth-century Jewish diaspora. Using both qualitative and quantitative (statistical) methods, I compare several family-specific, archaeological artifact collections from San Francisco, California, to show how diaspora Jews adapted their traditional practices to modern life while retaining their ethnic identity. Themes include the development of diverse religious practices, consumerism and social mobility, urban geography, and materiality.
... Scale is integral to this approach because, in the region since the 18th century, Saba was often considered to be an island populated by "poor people," thereby homogenizing the entire population of the island as poor, despite the existence of local class structures. This demonstrates a common dialectic that exists between poverty and space, seen elsewhere through the designation of certain urban areas as slums (Mayne and Murray 2001;Yamin 2001) and particular rural areas as poor (Horning 1999;Barnes 2011). The existence of poor spaces on Saba during this time compounds the importance of scale and locality toward positioning poverty within Saban and regional social relations. ...
Archaeological research concerning poverty has expanded during the 21st century. Finding poverty in material things has become a challenge, and, consequently, research has been reoriented to understanding the social processes that produce and sustain poverty. Poverty is understood differently according to class and experienced differently according to scale, locality, race, and gender. By taking a whole-society approach to the small island of Saba, Dutch Caribbean, the materiality of Saba’s classes can be made visible if the social processes behind them can be revealed. Designating groups, individuals, and landscapes as “poor,” however, homogenizes these material vectors for projecting class. This gives poverty an ephemeral nature relative to those designating poverty to people and spaces. Therefore, poverty is best understood reflexively through powered perspectives and powered landscapes, rather than through a static pile of representative material objects.
... The excavation of urban, Industrial Period, workers' housing was pioneered in several places in the late 20 th century: in New York in the USA and Sydney in Australia for instance (1) (Yamin 2001;Karskens 2001). In Britain the archaeological investigation of workers' housing only became a significant method of investigation after 1990 when UK planning guidance required developers to fund archaeological work ahead of redevelopment. ...
This paper uses 16 years of targeted fieldwork on excavating workers’ housing in the Manchester region, UK, to assess a variety of research approaches to the investigation of urban industrial housing of the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Manchester was one of the ‘shock’ cities of industrial Britain, and a honey pot for social commentary during the Victorian period. Using data from more than 30 excavation sites, it looks at the way in which archaeological evidence can be used to explore issues around house build quality, overcrowding, sanitation and disease, and reconstructing households from their material remains. Manchester's reputation for poor living conditions during the industrialising period was crystallised around the comments of contemporary social commentators from Engels to Gaskell. Yet, the archaeological evidence reviewed in this article demonstrates the value of archaeological approaches in challenging and testing such views through detailed case studies. More importantly, it shows that archaeological material can be used to study directly features of the new industrialised form of urban living, providing a set of research questions applicable across the industrial urban workers’ housing of Britain.
... With a strong revisionist agenda, advocates promised that these approaches could challenge and Bunravel conventional historical understandings,^being attentive to but not constrained by existing historical narratives and being informed but not driven by theory, in order to cast light on the Bactualities^of life in cities (Mayne and Murray 2001a, p. 1). Like similar studies focused on nineteenth-century households and communities in North American cities, this kind of historical archaeology has been most fruitfully applied to researching poorer urban neighborhoods where there has been an effort to reach beyond demonizing, bourgeois-driven representations of such localities to provide an account Bthat comes closer to an insider's view,^recovering the complex diversity of peoples' struggles and experiences that were part of their day-to-day existence (Yamin 2001a p. 2; see, more broadly, the essays in: Mayne and Murray 2001b;Yamin 2001bYamin , 2002Gadsby 2011;Spencer-Wood and Matthews 2011). Historians too have advocated the value of micro-historical perspectives and the study of everyday life in order to recover the agency of marginalized peoples and the complexity of their lived experiences (Port 2015). ...
The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325–48, 1999) termed “ethnographic” approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the “new mobilities paradigm,” it aims to place “mobility” as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.
... Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old " (Dickens 1842:88–89). His description resonates with the characterization of the archaeologists, who refer to it as a slum notorious for crime and vice (Yamin 2001 ). The archaeological project produced an enormous amount of artifactual material, based on rich features such as privies and cesspools. ...
... According to the historical archaeologist Rebecca Yamin, recent work in the Five Points district of New York told a story of New York 'becoming itself'. 39 This statement has since been imbued with a deep sense of irony, as artefacts and site records from the Five Points project were destroyed in a basement store beneath the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Prior to the late 18th century, the Five Points area had been outside the city limits. ...
This paper examines the ways in which international historical archaeologists have explored the recent past, in an effort to inform and contribute to contemporary debates about social identity and social inclusion. It is argued that the archaeology of the mundane and everyday can contribute to contemporary culture by creating a sense of community and developing social cohesion. Emphasis is placed upon the archaeology of the recent urban past and case studies are presented from New York, Sydney and Cape Town. The paper concludes that the study of the materiality of urban social life offers a powerful research tool for social scientists, and that archaeologists and heritage interpreters should make greater use of this form of evidence within the context of early 21st‐century urban regeneration schemes in the UK.
... They also disseminate the results of their work through peer-reviewed journal articles. Indeed, several thematic issues of the journal Historical Archaeology have been devoted to presenting not just technical but interpretive essays on major urban ''commercial'' archaeology projects such as those conducted in the Five Points neighborhood in New York City and in Boston in areas impacted by the depression of the Central Artery (Cheek, 1998;Yamin, 2001), on comprehensive CRM projects such as at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (Shackel and Winter, 1994), or on the results of multiple contract archaeology or CRM projects at sites associated with workers in the sex trade (Seifert, 2005) and construction workers' camps in the American West (Van Bueren, 2002). There is increasing evidence in the United Kingdom that ''commercial'' archaeology is becoming a part of the mainstream of historical (or post-medieval) archaeology as practiced there (see, e.g., Symonds et al., 2006;Palmer, 2007). ...
Archaeologist and philosopher of science Alison Wylie has observed that the very identity of archaeology as a discipline is
closely linked to how its practitioners frame their concerns around ethical issues (Wylie, 1996). Prior to the late 1970s,
most archaeologists developed a sense of ethically appropriate behavior on more or less an individual, ad hoc basis, relying
upon whatever role models presented themselves during graduate training and upon subsequent personal experience in the office
or in the field. This informal and highly idiosyncratic approach to professional ethics is not serviceable in the contemporary
milieu in which archaeology is practiced, as Brian Fagan (1993) and others have noted. A series of developments since the
1970s reflect the growing sense among professional archaeologists, particularly those working in the United States and the
United Kingdom, that they need some sort of structured approach to deal with the ethical issues they confront.
... The household constitutes a small and reasonable scale of archaeological research, but considerably more difficulty is introduced when archaeologists attempt to broaden the scale to include several households. Community studies also have a long tradition in historical archaeology, with much of the research being conducted in urban neighborhoods (e.g., Mrozowski 2006;Mullins 2008a;Mullins and Warner 2008;Murray and Crook 2005;Yamin 2001). Equally significant are neighborhoodtype studies conducted in seemingly non-neighborhood groups of households like extractive work camps (e.g., Lawrence 2000;Pickands 2000;Saitta 2007;Van Bueren 2002 and state-run institutions (e.g., Baugher and Spencer-Wood 2001;Casella 2007;Karskens 2003;Spencer-Wood and Baugher 2001). ...
The practice of historical archaeology has exploded over the past two decades, and especially since 2000. Methodological advances
and new theoretical insights mean that archaeological research requires periodic evaluation, and this overview builds on the
work of three earlier assessors of the discipline. Here, I concentrate on four areas of research currently being pursued by
historical archaeologists: analytical scale, capitalism, social inequality, and heritage and memory. I conclude that historical
archaeologists have made major strides in understanding the modern world and that future research promises to offer diverse
perspectives that will deepen our appreciation for how the past influences the present.
This chapter presents a discussion of the historical background to cesspits from ten Lots on the Commonwealth Block, Melbourne. It builds on previous publications by Murray and Mayne, but the core of the specific documentation of the cesspits and associated structures draws heavily on the site reports created by the first two major phases of excavation and on specific documentary research into the ownership and occupational histories of the houses and factories that comprised the Commonwealth Block precinct.
In this chapter we explore the evolution of our research into the urban archaeologies of Melbourne and Sydney from the earliest formulations based on a desire to better understand the genesis of urban Australia and the lives of the poorer inhabitants of Melbourne.
This chapter summarises the aims of the book and presents an extended discussion of the theoretical and methodological consequences of comparing cesspit assemblages from two Australian colonial cities.
In this chapter we examine the historical context of the backfilling of decommissioned cesspits and privies with domestic waste. This is a practice known throughout the modern world in metropolitan cities throughout the Anglophone world. Like many aspects of urbanisation, it was one subject to increasing regulation in the Victorian era as population densities increased and politicians, councillors, engineers and entrepreneurs worked to solve the many problems linked to the management of services and waste.
New York City has municipal laws requiring archaeological assessments on projects that involve discretionary permits. In 1980, a City Archaeology Program housed within the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was established. The City Archaeologist evaluates the work of CRM firms, and many high-profile CRM excavations have taken place. From 1980–1990, the City Archaeologist with her grant-funded staff and volunteer corps also undertook archaeological excavations on Native American and European American sites on city-owned properties. As the economic climate changed, early innovative programs for public outreach involving tours, exhibits, and public participation on excavations on city-owned property were eliminated. Developers challenged the permitting process. However, municipal laws regarding archaeology are still intact and CRM archaeologists continue to excavate endangered sites on developers’ properties.
From ancient times to the present, cities have been dynamic places that bring together people of diverse occupations and classes, and they are constantly transforming as economic, political, and social conditions change.
Life during the first Gilded Age in the United States (1865-1925) was a time of considerable social differentiation between rich and poor. Newly arrived immigrants with little money were often relegated to substandard housing in American cities. In this study, I argue that some nonwealthy immigrants were racialized as poor, and I investigate whether this racial categorization created homogeneity in housing and material culture. I use the Five Points district in New York City as my point of investigation, confining my analysis to the late 19th century. My findings are that both tenement housing and artifact possession were generally homogeneous when the analysis is performed at the societal scale.
The public dimensions of archaeological practice are explored through a new method called Marxist reflexivity. This use for Marxism draws a parallel with recent reflexive archaeologies that highlight the impact of archaeologists and archaeological processes on the creation of archaeological records. Though similar in this sense of critique, reflexive and Marxist archaeologies do not often overlap, as each is essentially driven by a distinct agenda and logic. Through a critical review of four public programs undertaken in historical archaeology, this distinction is disassembled.
Historical archaeology has promoted dramatic changes in its fields of endeavor over the past quarter century. Theoretical sophistication, international scope, particular attention to the subaltern, and manifold engagement with living stakeholder communities now characterize the profession. This epilogue considers the history of this intellectual progression, interweaving it with consideration of the specific contributions in this themed volume.
Within the railroad industry, the most powerful labor unions were exclusive craft organizations that concentrated on defending the privileges of a few skilled workers. Data from archaeological work conducted by Sonoma State University during the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project is used in an historical materialist exploration of class-consciousness among railroad workers in a late-19th-century working-class neighborhood in West Oakland, California. Comparing aspects of diet and dining, this study focuses on divisions among the railroad workers along the lines of craft-skill and nativity, examining the ways skilled craft unionists used the assumptions of Victorian ideology to organize against both their employers and other groups of workers, especially immigrants.
This essay identifies the potential of an emerging archaeological turn for anthropology—and for archaeology itself. I argue that despite the critiques of the past two decades, the temporality of modernity and a belief in its exceptionalism still structure much of anthropological thought, as exemplified in the division of archaeology and ethnography and in the subfield of historical archaeology and its dystopic treatment of modern urban ruins. But alternative temporalities and analytical possibilities are also emerging, ones attentive to the folding and recycling of cultural elements that Walter Benjamin described with such philosophical depth. On the ground, Benjamin’s insights can be put to use by paying greater attention to the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism’s creative destruction, to the social life of ruins, and to projects that challenge the linear divide between modernity and antiquity. Releasing anthropology from progressive time necessarily entails a reintegration of the subfields and a direct engagement with recent ruins.
In this paper I argue for an expansion of the role of assemblage analysis in understanding daily life in nineteenth-century working-class neighborhoods. The close and systematic examination of quality manufacture of nineteenth-century domestic goods offers a material link to consumer decision-making. This is demonstrated in a study of material culture from working-class sites in Sydney and London.
As interpretive landscape archaeologists, we practice a form of historical ethnography. We strive for holism and seek to decenter
master narratives through attention to the multilocality of places and the multivocality histories must embrace. Interpretation
implies revelation and insight, and so we view landscapes as resource, stages, and surfaces manipulated for aesthetic and
other expressive ends. In this essay, we apply these landscape concepts to understand the estates, farms, gardens, and buildings
of northern Delaware. In particular, we explored the present and pasts of two duPont estates, Mt. Cuba and Coverdale Farm.
The Lancashire Historic Town Survey, undertaken by Lancashire County Council between 2001 and 2006, examined the complex and varied history of 'working-class' housing in the east Lancashire textile towns. Often seen by the media and politicians as uniform and of low quality, and frequently condemned as slum dwellings, the surviving stock of such buildings results from past responses, both to housing requirements and to 'working-class' communities. It is argued that east Lancashire's housing has been a victim of inaccurate perceptions, both past and present, and of political bias and myth-making.
Matthew Johnson's engaging paper raises a number of critical issues for contemporary archaeological reflection. The paper takes as a given the existence of archaeological theory as a disciplinary tradition of scholarly engagement, as a social fact of the vita archaeologica. But Johnson resists, rightly I think, the temptation to define 'the archaeological' intellectually, in reference to a discrete analytical terrain over which archaeology holds sovereignty. As a result, a considerable weight is put upon what we might think of as the sociology of theoretical work - concrete practices of theoretical production and reproduction located within institutions such as the university and the department. While Matthew's paper largely focuses on the gaps within the current constellatory field between the ethos of archaeological training and the pathos that drives our theoretical agenda, in these brief remarks I want to suggest a more undisciplined sense of archaeological theory, one rooted less in the field itself and more in a historically and socially shifting understanding of the pastness of the object world.
In this paper I want to make some general comments on the state of archaeological theory today. I argue that a full answer to the question ‘does archaeological theory exist?’ must be simultaneously ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Yes, there is, demonstrably, a discourse called archaeological theory, with concrete structures such as individuals and schools of thought more or less substantively engaged with it; no, in that the claims for a distinctive way of thinking about the world in theoretical terms specific to archaeology, to which most or even the largest group of archaeologists would willingly or knowingly subscribe, are over-stated. In particular there is a lack of correspondence between theoretical backgrounds and affiliations that are overtly cited by archaeologists, on the one hand, and, on the other, the deeper underlying assumptions and traditions that structure their work and condition its acceptance. These underlying traditions stretch from field habits to underlying paradigms or discourses. I will explore this latter point with reference to the manner in which agency theory and phenomenology have been developed in archaeology. My conclusion suggests some elements of a way forward for archaeological theory; it is striking that many of these elements have been addressed in recent issues of Archaeological
dialogues.
Matthew Johnson's essay is somewhat more conservative than I had anticipated and I am happy about that. He promotes a scientific archaeology in the sense that he promotes the kind of knowledge that can be established through verifiability. Then he takes what I see to be an increasingly frequent approach to the use of the phenomenological and hermeneutic position in archaeology. His positions are relatively gentle on these matters and are an attempt to seek out a way to utilize archaeology as a superior political tool when it is needed, as it most assuredly is, from place to place in the world. He remains attuned to the established fact that the definitions of many facts are themselves a function of political contexts. I am not sure yet that Matthew Johnson's brief essay succeeds with all the links he intends to make, but I think that a number of scholars are headed in this direction.
Using a woman-centered approach, artifact assemblages and background documents are analyzed to discern gender behavior and ethnic variations in women's work-cooking, dining, housecleaning-in more frivolous areas-flowers, pets, girls' toys-and personal adornment. Issues of gender bias are discussed. The data show that negative evidence (absence vs. presence) is, at times, misleading and must be carefully considered. Detailed study of the artifacts connected with Irish women suggests their gender values that organized their lives differed from those of Anglo-American women who had a voice in small expressive purchases while men made final decisions on major household purchases. Irish women owned small items too. However, a crucial distinction was an element not covered by the archaeology: a house of their own and owner-occupied, a fact solely visible in documents.
This article uses the events of the 1913–14 Southern Colorado Coal strike and the cooperative work of the Colorado Coalfield
War Archaeology Project to explore emergent historical narratives of working-class poverty and the role they play in shaping
contemporary ideologies and public policy. It uses clothing as an entrée into discussions of the deserving and undeserving
poor, and asks how competing groups used dress in the context of the 1913–14 southern Colorado coal strike to fashion subjects
in particular ways. In so doing, it demonstrates the ineffectiveness of either-or dichotomies of deserving and undeserving
that still influence current public policy.
KeywordsPoverty–Working-class poor–Ludlow Massacre–Clothing
Since its publication in 1984, Chants Democratic has endured as a classic narrative on labor and the rise of American democracy. In it, Sean Wilentz explores the dramatic social and intellectual changes that accompanied early industrialization in New York. He provides a panoramic chronicle of New York City’s labor strife, social movements, and political turmoil in the eras of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Twenty years after its initial publication, Wilentz has added a new preface that takes stock of his own thinking, then and now, about New York City and the rise of the American working class.
by Helen Campbell ; with an introduction by Lyman Abbott ; supplemented by a journalist's description of little-known phases of New York life ; and a famous detective's thirty years' experiences and observations by Thomas W. Knox and Inspector Byrnes.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester, 1973. Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-244).
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