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Hist Arch
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-024-00509-4
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Introduction: Urban Historical Archaeology ofandas
Dissonance—An Invitation forCollaboration
SarahPlatt · KellyM.Britt
Accepted: 17 October 2022
© The Author(s) 2024
Keywords Urban archaeology· Dissonance· Collaboration
of which we archaeologists are still grappling with
today (Babiarz 2011; Platt 2020); see Graff (this
issue), Gray and Williams (this issue), Ike (this
issue), Niculescu (this issue), Ryzewski (this issue).
and Skolnik and Lee (this issue). The result of this
dramatic uptick in excavations was the belated reali-
zation that historically urban sites survived in and
under present densely developed cities and were able
to provide unique insights into past life within those
cities (Salwen 1982:xiii; Zierden and Calhoun 1984).
This realization prompted an archaeology of the
city, an analytical consideration of life within these
urban places (Dickens 1982:xix; Rothschild and Wall
2014:20–21; Zierden and Calhoun 1984).1
Key figures began to emerge as archaeologists with
the responsibility of overseeing these resources wran-
gled the unique research challenges, practical and the-
oretical, of archaeology within and of the city. Zierden
and Calhoun’s (1984) research design for the city of
Charleston, South Carolina, represents one of these
early efforts to dictate a clear set of archaeological
methodologies for an urban landscape. Their research
foci reflect concerns with social complexity, human
S.Platt(*)
Department ofSociology andAnthropology,
College ofCharleston, 66 George Street, Charleston,
SouthCarolina29424, U.S.A.
e-mail: plattse@cofc.edu
K.M.Britt
Department ofAnthropology, Brooklyn College,
2900 Bedford Avenue, James Hall 3307, Brooklyn,
NewYork11233, U.S.A.
1 Though Baugher et al. (2017:4) emphasize archaeology in
the city is just as important as of the city, noting that in the
course of their work urban archaeologists often uncover evi-
dence of the ancient world and of previous occupations by
Indigenous peoples.
Introduction
The rise of urban archaeology as a practice in the
United States and within the field of historical archae-
ology is tied to the passage of Section 106 of the
National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 (36 CFR
part 800) (Dickens 1982:xix; Rothschild and Wall
2014:27; Yamin 2014:7525–7532). These require-
ments for contract archaeology propelled the excava-
tion of urban sites—archaeology in the city, as argued
by the father of American urban archaeology, Bert
Salwen, in 1973 (Rothschild and Wall 2014:20)—and
resulted in the production of historical period archae-
ological material at a previously unseen scale. They
also corresponded with the so-called urban-renewal
movements of the 1970s (Zierden and Calhoun
1984:12), resulting in large-scale urban-development
projects that prompted Section106 compliance—the
social, theoretical, and interpretive consequences
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adaptation to dense urban environments, economic
and provisioning networks, site formation, and city
infrastructure systems (Zierden and Calhoun 1984:6).
They adopt the city-site approach as proposed by
the municipal research team in Alexandria, Virginia
(Zierden and Calhoun 1984:13), where any individual
excavation is approached as one component of a larger
site—the city complex as a whole (Cressey and Ste-
phens 1982). Their practical considerations reflect a
concern regarding the lack of a protective ordinance
for belowground historical resources in Charleston,
the home of one of the earliest comprehensive historic
preservation laws for the aboveground built landscape,
first instituted in the 1930s (Hamer 1998; Weyeneth
2000; Page and Mason 2004).
The field of historical archaeology, on the whole,
has grown exponentially since these early decades, and
the transforming social world of the present has intro-
duced new concerns for archaeologists working in and
studying urban landscapes. This special issue has sev-
eral international contributions (Gardner, this issue;
McAtackney, this issue; Ylimaunu et al., this issue),
reflecting the initially intended and continually broad-
ening international scope of the discipline since the
Society for Historical Archaeology’s (SHA) concep-
tion in 1967 (Pilling 1967). However, while some key
questions and research foci regarding archaeologies
of and in the city have been answered, many remain
functionally the same as those introduced at the sub-
field’s mid-century formulation. While some cities
now have legislation in place, others, like Charleston,
for example, still lack a protective archaeological ordi-
nance (Behre 2021), and concerns around gentrifica-
tion still form a prominent undercurrent of archaeolo-
gists’ work as they grapple with the consequences of
mid-century urban-renewal efforts (Britt 2023).
At the outset of this project, the editors of this special
issue intended to invite urban archaeological research-
ers from both inside and outside the United States
to begin to collaborate on some of the concerns that
have emerged since the formulation of urban histori-
cal archaeology as a subfield. We initially invited our
contributors to participate in an SHA conference under
unusual global circumstances. In 2021, at the height of
the COVID-19 pandemic prior to the wide availability
of a vaccine and amid a resurgence of protests and calls
for action by the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM),
archaeologists joined in community over Zoom for
the 2021 virtual SHA conference, An Archaeological
Decameron: Research, Interpretation, and Engagement
in the Time of Pandemic. The historical moment we
were in directly influenced the theme and goals of our
session to discuss urban spaces as centers of dissent and
upheaval, with the names of cities, such as Minneapo-
lis, Baltimore, Charleston, Charlottesville, and Bristol
(UK), serving as referents for moments of intense social
disjuncture, conflict, and grief.
The participants in this session and subsequently the
authors in this special issue were asked, in particular,
to consider the concept of “dissonance” (a clash, dis-
harmony, tension) within early modern, modern, and
postmodern urban spaces. In essence, we were address-
ing questions and concerns regarding the fundamental
reality of social complexity and density within urban
places that were of primary concern to many of the
first dedicated urban historical archaeology research
programs in the United States—for example, though
certainly not limited to, Charleston (Zierden and Cal-
houn 1984) and Alexandria (Cressey and Stephens
1982; Cressey et al. 1982). The papers that emerged
introduced a distinct wrinkle in our initial interpreta-
tion of this concept of dissonance, challenging us as
editors and, we hope, our readers to consider urban
archaeologies both of and as dissonance, or the ways
that the research practice of archaeology itself requires
moments of tension and friction within the city.
Of Dissonance
The concept of dissonance as a reality of lived experi-
ences in dense and complex urban spaces was and is
perhaps an easy interpretive leap to make, given the
context of our own lived experiences in the present. As
we sat in our homes in various places across the globe
during the virtual SHA session, we noted that the title
of the session, Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Vio-
lence, Friction, and Change, had unfortunately been
brought into immediate, painful, and stark relief by the
events in Washington, D.C., the previous week.
On 6 January 2021, armed insurrectionists laid
siege to the Capitol Building, set to overturn the results
of the fall 2020 presidential election. Among the
incredible and often frightening visual archives that
emerged from that day, two moments came to mind
for us as session organizers. First, the stark image of
insurrectionist Kevin Seefriend (Barnes 2023) carry-
ing a Confederate battle flag over his shoulder inside
the Capitol Building, with two portraits within the
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frame behind him (Barnes 2023), Charles Sumner on
the right, and John C. Calhoun on the left. Sumner
was an antislavery senator from Massachusetts dur-
ing the Civil War period, and Calhoun was a vocal and
staunch defender of the institution of slavery whose
ideologies figured prominently in the secession of the
American South. A second visual document, a video
of a Washington, D.C., resident shouting angrily at
the invaders from his porch (AJ+ 2021), captures a
passing driver calling back in agreement: “They’re
destroying our city.” The man on his porch replies, in
evident pain: “They’re destroying the fucking city and
it’s like nobody gives a shit.” The photo, in a moment
of eerie continuity, serves as a reminder that this place
has long been a center of upheaval and friction. The
video is a reminder that city dwellers have always
been bystanders, participants, and instigators, but, no
matter the role, these residents continue to live with
and navigate the consequences of these flashpoints of
conflict in urban centers long after the media cycle
churns away. These realities would have been as true
in the past as they are in the present.
This is lucidly addressed by McAtackney (this
issue) in her contribution, as she highlights the dis-
sonances of the more recent past in her discussion
of the “represencing” of material memories at the
site of the bombing of McGurk’s Bar in Belfast—a
site of sectarian violence during the euphemistically
entitled “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. She indi-
cates how the memory of this “low-level civil war” is
continually renegotiated in the material world, shap-
ing everyday lived realities in the present. Similarly,
Ylimaunu, Mullins, and Aalto (this issue) explore the
landscape of civil-war memorialization in Finland
following Finnish independence in 1917. They argue
that the “Reds,” the socialists who lost the conflict,
generated a dissonant counter-monumental landscape
to the state-sponsored narrative of the conflict.
Aubey, Britt, and Gold (this issue) also deploy
landscape and memory, but instead investigate the
infrastructure and apparatus of surveillance and polic-
ing through time in Lower Manhattan, New York
City. In particular, they investigate these spaces after
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, considering these material
responses to moments of protest and conflict, such as
the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park.
Skolnik and Lee (this issue) focus on slave jails in
Alexandria, Virginia. They demonstrate that, as the
site transformed in use to a military prison post–Civil
War and then to its present iteration as a museum
addressing the domestic slave trade, historical issues
of anti-Black racism from the past bubble to the
surface in the present, providing a place not only to
memorialize those lives lost to the horrors of slavery,
but also a place to deal expressly with the atrocities
of white supremacy in the now. They are a reminder
of how relevant these past histories are to the present
through a quote from Mark Leone (2010:205): “This
is the huge lie in historical archaeology: the past is
dead. It is not.”
Often the processes of urbanization themselves,
and politics and policies under which they occurred,
were a source of friction. Ryzewski (this issue)
addresses the excavations at old Hamtramck Center
near Detroit, using archaeological evidence to explore
the transformations of the space through time and the
changing social landscape of the rapidly developing
industrial center. Similarly, Williams and Gray (this
issue) explore “technopolitics,” or the use of “tech-
nology to expand, change, or manipulate state power”
through the analysis of infrastructure and waste man-
agement in Storyville, the well-known red-light dis-
trict of New Orleans. They tease out the moral world
the state was “imagining” through segregated land-
scapes and compare it to the realities of lived diver-
sity within the neighborhood that continue into the
present. Once again, the process of urbanization is
unveiled, not as a linear progression with no resist-
ance, but rather as one marred with resistive tactics,
ones at times obvious on the surface, but also many
more subtle strategies that lie beneath.
Ike (this issue), like McAtackney (this issue) and
Ylimaunu et al. (this issue), also considers memory
of past violence in her manuscript addressing the
archaeological remnants of the Tulsa Race Massa-
cre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. However, critically, she also
introduces the concept of archaeological practice as
dissonance, as she explores the community response
to two research endeavors to trace the material rem-
nants of the massacre and identify and uncover
human remains. Ike’s manuscript and others (Agbe-
Davies, this issue; Aubey et al., this issue; Bagley
etal., this issue; Gardner, this issue; Graff, this issue;
Lans, this issue; Niculescu, this issue; Warner-Smith,
this issue) beautifully illustrate that urban historical
archaeology both explores these moments of friction
and in and of itself has been and continues to be a
form of dissonance.
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As Dissonance
As Salwen notes in the earliest decades of the subfield,
urban archaeology is inherently disruptive, stating that
at the most basic physical level, any excavation
in a city—whether for a building foundation
or for purposes of archaeological research—is
almost certain to be more technically complex,
more disruptive of the normal routines of more
people, and considerably more expensive than
the removal of an equal volume of fill from a
less heavily utilized setting. (Salwen 1982:xiv)
Beyond this, although historical archaeology is
by its very nature interdisciplinary, urban settings
demand a level of “comfortablity” with integrating
multiple forms of data—archaeological, architectural,
archival, and beyond—in ways our session discus-
sant Paul Mullins indicated, roughly quoted, would
trouble those “patrolling the boundaries of the disci-
pline”2 (Mullins 2021).
We are certainly not the first to make this assertion.
O’Keeffe and Yamin (2006:90) note that “boundaries
between interpretive urban historical archaeology
and other fields in the humanities and social sciences
that are concerned with urbanism are clearly difficult
to identify.” The practices, methods, and theories of
historical urban archaeologies have developed within
an inherently interdisciplinary context (O’Keeffe and
Yamin 2006:87). Although urban theory and studies
still have yet to absorb the insights from archaeology
(Dawdy 2016), the intersections between archaeologi-
cal practice in cities and other disciplines are readily
apparent. In material worlds consisting of a compli-
cated jumble of past and present landscapes, both
above and below ground, and a complex and popu-
lous web of past and present human actors at a den-
sity often unseen in rural sites, research engagement
beyond stratigraphy and artifacts alone operates as the
rule rather than the exception.
Effective historical archaeological practice in
urban spaces requires the acknowledgement that
archaeology serves as just one component in a wider
project involving preservationists, historians, conser-
vationists, municipal officials, and community stake-
holders. This phenomenon is certainly experienced
on suburban and rural sites, but is demanded as a
practice in cities, where archaeologists must work in
close collaboration with other heritage profession-
als and easily traverse different lines of evidence to
tell a shared story (or a competing story); see Bagley
et al. (this issue), Aubey et al. (this issue), Ike (this
issue), Graff (this issue), Lans (this issue), McAtack-
ney (this issue), Niculescu (this issue), Warner-Smith
(this issue), and Ylimaunu etal. (this issue). Bagley,
Lee, Collins, and Russo not only illustrate the differ-
ent lines of evidence of a shared story from personal
experience and oral histories, but also how these lines
of evidence can, at times, create narratives compet-
ing with each other or with the authorized narrative
known by the general public, illuminating the com-
plexities inherent in doing any type of collaborative
archaeology. Through public archaeological surveys,
three separate narratives of Boston places, includ-
ing Chinatown, the Boston Latin School site, and
Malcolm X’s home site, illustrated how “hard histo-
ries” focusing on such issues as enslavement, civil
rights, and displacement have an immediate and
direct impact on the present, where they note: “The
act of archaeology itself exposed friction and inspired
change” (Bagley etal., this issue).
The contribution of Bagley et al. demonstrates
that, in much the same way that past urban dwellers
experienced the friction of daily life spent in close
proximity with others, introducing friction in social
interaction and exchange that sometimes ignited, so
too is friction experienced by archaeologists in the
city, who by necessity collaborate with others and
sometimes traverse already hazy disciplinary bounda-
ries. Rather than archaeology serving as the “hand-
maiden to history” (Noël Hume 1964), it should and
often must operate in tandem with other fields to
reach a common research goal.
Archaeology can often be under-resourced and
underutilized in the complex political environment
of present cities, as Dawdy (2016) argues in regard to
archaeological contributions to studies of urbanism.
Graff (this issue), in her discussion of Mecca Flats in
Chicago, Illinois, argues that the act of archaeology
itself is a form of dissonance. She notes that archaeo-
logical research in Chicago faces a lack of a protec-
tive legal apparatus at a municipal level and sustained
2 We deeply regret that Paul Mullins has passed at the time of
this writing, and we are relying on our own personal notes and
memories of his insightful and valuable comments from that
day. He is sorely missed as both a tremendous scholar and col-
league.
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tenure-track lines or other salaried and staffed posi-
tions in the city that could support continued research
and urban excavation. In Chicago, heritage research
is dominated by architectural history and “venera-
tion of great architects and architecture,” limiting the
kinds of stories highlighted in the city’s narratives.
By contrast, Niculescu (this issue) traces the archaeo-
logical consequences of urban renewal in a city with
an established municipal archaeology program. She
returns to legacy collections to highlight how the
context of the program’s development in Alexan-
dria, Virginia, influenced how certain narratives were
highlighted over others within the negotiation of the
collective historical memory of the city.
Challenging the contours of what archaeology
methodologically can and should be, Agbe-Davies
deploys a “documentary archaeology” (Beaudry
1988) as she traces the material, spatial, and temporal
trajectories of the Chicago “riot” of 1919. She focuses
particularly on the experiences of Black women and
how they navigated experiences of risk and violence
differently than men. She concludes by drawing these
narrative threads forward into the present, reflecting
too on the events in Washington, D.C., in 2021. Simi-
larly, Fesler (this issue) creatively excavates the docu-
mentary archive to investigate the lives of free Black
residents of Alexandria, Virginia, during Nathaniel
Turner’s 1831 rebellion. He traces social and material
connections among 46 Black petitioners who asserted
their loyalty to the city in the wake of this moment of
violence, while applying archaeological methodolo-
gies to the documentary record.
Lans (this issue), like Agbe-Davies (this issue),
also investigates the experiences of Black women in
these moments of upheaval and protest via “the skel-
etal archive,” exploring the lives of 79 Black women
whose remains are held within the Huntington Col-
lection at the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History. She deploys the theoretical concept
of the “wake” (Sharpe 2016), using bioarchaeology
and the archive to highlight the lives of Black women
in moments of dissonance throughout the history of
New York City, where their remains were unethically
collected as medical specimens in the early 20th cen-
tury. Warner-Smith (this issue) addresses the Irish
individuals within the Huntington Collection and
proposes a “slow bioarchaeology” as an active coun-
ter to perpetuating the processes of dehumanization
enacted against human subjects in death as they are
transformed into disarticulated specimens by dis-
section. She tacks between the osteological data and
archival life histories to explore the impacts of urban
processes and landscapes of labor upon individual
lives and bodies, particularly those of aging women.
Beyond Dissonance
Among the themes that emerged from discussions
in the conference session and collaboration on this
special issue was a keen hunger for a dedicated and
shared space of discussion and exchange of ideas
among urban historical archaeologists. We realized
through our conversations both within the session
and beyond, that we not only faced similar challenges
across our urban spaces of focus, but that many of
these challenges spanned generations of city-centered
researchers. In the 1980s and 1990s, the SHA hosted
an urban archaeology working group, with Pamela
Cressey and the team at Alexandria Archaeology
leading the charge as early urban historical archaeol-
ogy practitioners explored questions critical to their
burgeoning field in the wake of Section106 (Martha
Zierden 2021, pers. comm.).
Our conference session and this special issue
of articles that emerged from it represent our pro-
posed first step in rekindling a space for conversa-
tion between archaeologists engaged in questions
both of and within experiences of urbanity during
the early modern, modern, and postmodern world.
While our focus on the concept of dissonance the-
matically guides the contributing authors, here we
wish to place these scholarly contributions within the
wider canon of urban historical archaeology (“Where
We’ve Been”) and invite our fellow urban researchers
to interrogate what questions may guide a collective
of present urban archaeological researchers forward
(“Where We’re Going”).
Where We’ve Been
As discussed at the outset, urban archaeology, as it
is thought of today, really took hold in the middle
of the 20th century as an official subdiscipline of
historical archaeology (McAtackney and Ryzewski
2017). Urban archaeology goes deeper in time and
beyond the scope of historical archaeology’s general
defining bookends of the modern period, however.
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It is both the practice of archaeology within a geo-
graphical location, the city, and the study of the
process of urbanization. Therefore, urban archaeol-
ogy is both work done in the city, as in archaeologi-
cal fieldwork or related to projects and questions
that can be directly connected to archaeology of the
city, in understanding the process of urbanization.
The focus of much urban archaeology conducted in
the 20th century was the resource (Purser 2023:xv).
Concerns on how to preserve, protect, and/or study
the site through archaeological investigations were at
the forefront, influenced by the laws and regulations
governing historical resources during this time. His-
toric preservation laws of the 20th century played a
large role in this new focus, particularly in the United
States. While the U.S. had federal preservation leg-
islation at the beginning of the 20th century, such as
the 1906 Antiquities Act, it was not until the National
Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was passed that it
became clear that not only can urban archaeologi-
cal fieldwork be done in the city, but urban archae-
ology provides unique opportunities to understand
the process of urbanization itself through “windows”
into different times and spaces, such as household
or industrial archaeology (Nan A. Rothschild 2023,
pers. comm.). Prior to this, it was thought that, due
to constant development in urban centers, there would
be little to no archaeological resources preserved to
excavate and therefore little to tell.
The movement in the mid-20th century for more
stringent laws at national, state, and local levels pro-
vided an umbrella for many urban archaeologists to
unite over the resource—archaeological sites. This is
clearly seen with the development of an urban archae-
ological committee within the SHA during this time.
Practitioners within cultural-resource management
(CRM) and academia joined forces as well as bridged
gaps between disciplines of related fields in architec-
ture and the natural and built environments in order
to create, share, and support the variety of efforts to
preserve archaeological resources. While this initially
began as discussions that crossed time and space,
this coming-of-age period within urban archaeol-
ogy during the development of contract archaeology
also started the development of “silos”—segregating
CRM and academic work (McAtackney and Ryzewski
2017:9).
Silos also emerged for cities, as legislation was
enacted in some but not all urban centers (see above
regarding Charleston, South Carolina). For archae-
ologists working in urban spaces, adhering to these
new preservation laws and ordinances to protect
the resource and holding municipalities account-
able was one of the main aims of the 1970s and to
the early 2000s (Geismar 2023). Urban spaces are
usually regulated by ordinances and laws that gov-
ern the when, where, what, and how of conducting
archaeological fieldwork and are directly related to
urban development and redevelopment. Therefore,
access to particular urban spaces in the city directly
influences the research questions that can be asked.
Many localized archaeological organizations devel-
oped at this time, such as Archaeology in Annapo-
lis (Historic Annapolis and University of Maryland,
1982) and Professional Archaeologists of New York
City (PANYC, 1980) just to name a couple (Geis-
mar 2023). Focus shifted to a more localized per-
spective seen in legislative oversight, the develop-
ment of CRM firms, and the excavation of local
sites where some of the well-known, larger, urban
archaeological collections were amassed.
The newly enacted preservation laws directly
affected where and when fieldwork could be done,
what could be preserved, and had a more direct tie
to the present and the community that lived there.
Therefore, research questions were geared around
these parameters, producing a much more localized,
community-based approach to fieldwork, but also
dictating what one could study (Nan A. Rothschild
2023, pers. comm.). Research questions aligned
with the theoretical shift happening within the dis-
cipline of archaeology as a whole, from a proces-
sual approach that looked at questions on process
to a more nuanced approach focusing on the indi-
vidual or household. What emerged, we theorize,
were research questions that pertained directly to
specific cities, their origins, and their develop-
ment through the study of individual sites within
them. As archaeologists focused on these localized
issues, conversations about particular themes across
regions lessened, while localized ones on specific
sites became more prominent.
Where We Are Going ( ... and an Invitation)
Moving from the 20th to the 21st century a change
in focus is evident. While the political nature of the
overarching discipline of archaeology has been and
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continues to be debated, many scholars have dis-
cussed the intertwining relationship of both the sub-
ject and practice of archaeology with the political
(Trigger 1989; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; McGuire
2008) and this relationship’s implications. As Rafael
Pedro Curtoni (2014:396) notes: “[B]y its origin,
scope, implications, overt and hidden actions, and
omissions, archaeological practice is always inher-
ently political.” Urban archaeology, due to where it
is conducted and under what circumstances (its link
to development, CRM, historic preservation laws,
and location in living spaces), “is always public and
political” (O’Keeffe and Yamin 2006:101). Thereby,
the need for direct and continued stakeholder engage-
ment is immediate, as evidenced by the sea change in
community-engaged practices brought by the African
Burial Ground Project in New York City (LaRoche
and Blakey 1997; George and Britt 2023); see Bagley
et al. (this issue), Ike (this issue), and McAtackney
(this issue).
Why is this need for direct engagement so para-
mount for urban archaeology? For many reasons.
First and foremost, cities are dynamic, ever-chang-
ing spaces, and many still believe that because of
the constant aspect of development, archaeological
resources no longer exist. Being able to conduct
urban archaeology at all is dependent on historic
preservation ordinances and laws that not only exist
(or not), but are also enforced (or not). Many of the
articles in this issue address this through direct and
indirect ways; see Bagley etal. (this issue), Gard-
ner (this issue), Graff (this issue), McAtackney (this
issue), Niculescu (this issue), Ryzewski (this issue),
Skolnik and Lee (this issue), and Ylimaunu et al.
(this issue). However, some papers also illustrate
this is changing despite the politics of development
and economics that intertwines with policy; see Ike
(this issue), Niculescu (this issue), and Graff (this
issue).
Therefore, we urban archaeologists are poised once
again to think across regions and urban landscapes
to unifying themes that can encompass a variety of
urban perspectives. Many of the legacy collections
excavated in the 1970s–1990s are now being reexam-
ined through new technology and theoretical lenses,
providing a wonderful opportunity to revisit cross-
city (not just in the U.S., but with a global focus)
research and engage in comparative discussions.
While not abandoning the focus on city-specific needs
and research questions, urban archaeology as a sub-
discipline is in a unique position not only to provide
information on the past, but also be an active agent
of change for the making of the future city through
multisited lenses. In light of the events from 2020
onward, from the pandemic to the BLM movement, to
the insurrection in the U.S. and the removal of statues
globally, these moments of dissonance are happening
in urban spaces, and we see the need to once again
join forces as a collective, resurrect an urban archae-
ology committee, and move the discussion forward
into the 21st century.
What we are proposing is to continue to move for-
ward with an urban archaeology of and as dissonance
through the following:
• Expansion of methodological inquiry by making
the use of contract archaeological work, legacy,
and orphaned collections not the outlier of archae-
ological inquiry, but rather part of the status quo;
see Aubey etal. (this issue), Graff (this issue), Lans
(this issue), Skolnick and Lee (this issue), Ryzewski
(this issue), and Warner-Smith (this issue).
• In addition to this expansion of methods, welcome
alternative interpretive frames: including documen-
tary archaeology, slow archaeology, archaeology
of the contemporary past, and other relevant disci-
plines, such as Black studies; see Agbe-Davis (this
issue), Fesler (this issue), Gardner (this issue), Lans
(this issue), Warner-Smith (this issue), McAtackney
(this issue), and Ylimaunu etal. (this issue).
• Incorporation of communities, stakeholders, organi-
zations, and descendant communities as more active
agents within archaeological projects. While this is
not a new concept, more active involvement of these
groups in projects specifically governed by historic
preservation laws needs to be expanded; see Bagley
et al. (this issue), Ike (this issue), and Niculescu,
(this issue).
• The breaking down of the regional/city-specific
silos to create a more comprehensive and com-
parative look at urban archaeology, how it is done,
and the questions that can be asked in and of these
spaces; see Williams and Gray (this issue).
• Last but not least, building on the breaking
down of professional silos (i.e., academia vs.
CRM) to recreate a committee within the SHA
that expressly focuses on urban archaeology and
allows for project collaboration, comparative anal-
Hist Arch
1 3
Vol:. (1234567890)
yses, mutual political and professional support,
and a space to come together to discuss, debate,
and create the unique opportunities and challenges
urban archaeology brings.
How these actions specifically unfold, are edited,
and are added to should be discussed as a collec-
tive, incorporating the variety of thoughts from those
practicing urban archaeology from a global perspec-
tive in a multitude of professional settings. Therefore,
this issue not only brings together some of the most
forward-thinking projects in urban archaeology today,
but is also intended to be a call to join us in shaping
and reshaping its future.
Acknowledgments: Since this scholarly process began in the
middle of a pandemic and continued through multiple social
and political movements and conflicts such as the Black Lives
Matter Movement, the United States insurrection, and the Rus-
sian invasion of Ukraine, just to name a few, most of which
took place or began in urban centers, it became increasingly
important to bring this discussion into being. Therefore, we are
deeply grateful to all our contributors to this edited issue for
their hard work, dedication, and patience. We would be amiss
if we did not also acknowledge our mentors, many of whom
were the foremothers of urban archaeology, particularly Nan A.
Rothschild and Martha Zierden, for their groundbreaking work
in this subfield that truly paved the way for the discussions that
we bring to the table in this issue. All mistakes are our own.
Funding Open access funding provided by the Carolinas
Consortium.
Declarations
Conflict of Interest The corresponding author states that
there is no conflict of interest.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Com-
mons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits
use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any
medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the
original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Crea-
tive Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The
images or other third party material in this article are included
in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated
otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not
included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your
intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly
from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit
http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.
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