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Winner, 2023 SAA Book Award - Popular, Society for American Archaeology
Honorable Mention, 2024 Felicia A. Holton Book Award, Archaeological Institute of America
Bits and pieces of the lives led long before the age of skyscrapers are scattered throughout New York City, found in backyards, construction sites, street beds, and parks. Indigenous tools used thousands of years ago; wine jugs from a seventeenth-century tavern; a teapot from Seneca Village, the nineteenth-century Black settlement displaced by Central Park; raspberry seeds sown in backyard Brooklyn gardens—these everyday objects are windows into the city’s forgotten history.
Buried Beneath the City uses urban archaeology to retell the history of New York, from the deeper layers of the past to the topsoil of recent events. The book explores the ever-evolving city and the day-to-day world of its residents through artifacts, from the first traces of Indigenous societies more than ten thousand years ago to the detritus of Dutch and English colonization and through to the burgeoning city’s transformation into the modern metropolis. It demonstrates how the archaeological record often goes beyond written history by preserving mundane things—details of everyday life that are beneath the notice of the documentary record. These artifacts reveal the density, diversity, and creativity of a city perpetually tearing up its foundations to rebuild itself. Lavishly illustrated with images of objects excavated in the city, Buried Beneath the City is at once an archaeological history of New York City and an introduction to urban archaeology.
— Elizabeth Blackmar, coauthor of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park
This beautiful book demonstrates how much is available to recover from beneath our feet in New York City. The authors guide us sure-handedly through the pre-twentieth century collision of cultures that still affects our world today.
— Leslie M. Harris, author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863
Buried Beneath the City unearths a new vista, the remains of the days before Europeans arrived and of lost quotidian life since. Take a revealing self-guided underground expedition through material evidence that sheds light on the periods and people neglected by the documentary record.
— Sam Roberts, author of A History of New York in 101 Objects
This is a terrific book, one well worthy of reading. Writing a book accessible to all readers, the authors present the complexities and the unique contributions of archaeological excavation and thorough research on the recovered artifacts to our understanding of the panorama of human occupation of a living city. I applaud the authors for their success.
— Martha Zierden, coauthor of Charleston: An Archeology of Life in a Coastal Community
Nan A. Rothschild is an urban social archaeologist who was Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and is adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Amanda Sutphin is the director of archaeology at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and manages the NYC Archaeological Repository: The Nan A. Rothschild Research Center.
H. Arthur Bankoff is the advisor to the chair for archaeology at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
Jessica Striebel MacLean is an urban archaeologist at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the NYC Archaeological Repository.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission is the largest municipal preservation agency in the United States. It is responsible for protecting New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings and sites by granting them landmark or historic district status and regulating them after designation.
Preface
Introduction
1. Indigenous Peoples Before the City
2. Dutch Beginnings, 1624–1664
3. The British Colonial City and the Nascent Republic, 1664–1800
4. Growing Pains, 1800–1840
5. Development of the Modern City, 1840–1898
Conclusion
Appendix A: The New York City Landmarks and Historic Districts Discussed in the Book
Appendix B: Archaeological Sites Within New York City Discussed in the Book
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index