Overview

Historical Archaeology of New York City is a collection of narratives about people who lived in New York City during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, people whose lives archaeologists have encountered during excavations at sites where these people lived or worked. The stories are ethnohistorical or microhistorical studies created using archaeological and documentary data. As microhistories, they are concerned with particular people living at particular times in the past within the framework of world events. The world events framework will be provided in short introductions to chapters grouped by time periods and themes. The foreword by Mary Beaudry and the afterword by LuAnne DeCunzo bookend the individual case studies and add theoretical weight to the volume. Historical Archaeology of New York City focuses on specific individual life stories, or stories of groups of people, as a way to present archaeological theory and research. Archaeologists work with material culture—artifacts—to recreate daily lives and study how culture works; this book is an example of how to do this in a way that can attract people interested in history as well as in anthropological theory.

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9781461452713

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Reviews

With this volume, Janowitz and Dallal offer a collection of archaeologically based narratives of past residents of New York City, spanning the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. ... This book would be of interest to a wide range of historians, archaeologists, and ethnographers, as much for its approach to the production of narratives from historical and archaeological data as for the specific content of its papers. (John P. McCarthy, Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 71, 2015)

Author Information

Dr. Janowitz has over twenty-five years experience in historical archaeology, with an emphasis on the study of material culture. She has served as a materials analyst and laboratory supervisor on a wide variety of projects and has been a primary or contributing author on a number of cultural resource management reports. Her specialties include urban archaeology in the Northeast and she has worked on projects in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Wilmington, Delaware. As part of the process of artifact analysis, she designed and implemented a computer coding and data retrieval system for historic period artifacts. She is currently Material Specialist and Laboratory Coordinator, at the URS Corporation, Burlington, NJ. Diane Dallal, a technical director at AKRF, has 30 years of experience in cultural resources management, fieldwork, artifact analysis, conservation, and the management of archaeological collections in the New York City metropolitan area. She has conducted numerous archival, field and artifact research projects and co-authored Phase I-III reports for agency approval pursuant to SEQRA and CEQR. Ms. Dallal has worked on numerous archaeological investigations in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio and Puerto Rico. She was the director of New York City’s only urban archaeology museum, New York Unearthed, and is the former curator of the South Street Seaport Museum’s archaeological collections of over 2 million artifacts. Ms. Dallal is an expert in the interpretation of archaeological sites for the general public and has curated several exhibits incorporating artifacts from archaeological sites in New York City.

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