Water for the City,Ruins for the Country: Archaeology of the New York City Watershed

Two New York City institutions, the Board of Water Supply (BWS) and Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), have shaped rural regions far outside city boundaries. The BWS depopulated places selected for reservoir construction. Residents were evicted and towns were demolished then submerged. Those who remained struggled to reorganize their lives amid the landscape clearance. Once the reservoirs were complete, the DEP replaced the BWS as the institution in charge of ensuring the city’s water supply. The DEP Police patrols around the reservoirs and enforces land-use regulations. Archaeological survey of city-owned watershed lands reveals a scarred landscape of ongoing colonial conflict.     

The Archaeology of Slavery at the Van Cortlandt Plantation in the Bronx,New York

Excavations at the Van Cortlandt Mansion, the central structure of an eighteenth-century plantation located in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, New York, highlight the difficulty of using archaeological evidence to document the story of enslavement in early America. While the documents indicate the extent of the Van Cortlandts' involvement in the slave trade and in the reliance on enslaved labor to build and run their enterprise, the excavations carried out over several years have not yielded concomitant evidence.     

Archaeology and environment in York

Despite extensive excavation work both in the City and Vale of York, there has been little attempt to synthesize the considered wealth of biological information which has occurred. This paper discusses some of the preliminary results obtained by the Environmental Research Team of the York Archaeological Trust and endeavours to relate these into the rather inadequate regional background, a mosaic, which, even in comparatively well-studied fields such as animal and human bones, still has more holes than pieces. Considerable emphasis is placed upon the more recently developed lines of research, particularly the insect remains, since it is felt that these have much more to offer than is realized by most archaeologists. The final section reviews certain aspects of the interaction between man and his environment, particularly the climate, in relation to the limited amount of evidence as yet recovered from York. This research has stressed the additional amount of information which can be gained by a close association of field archaeologist, historian and environmental scientists.     

Evaluating Community Archaeology in the UK

Abstract

Does community archaeology work? In the UK over the last decade, there has been a boom in projects utilising the popular phrase 'community archaeology'. These projects can take many different forms and have ranged from the public face of research and developer-funded programmes to projects run by museums, archaeological units, universities, and archaeological societies. Community archaeology also encapsulates those projects run by communities themselves or in dialogue between 'professional' and 'amateur' groups and individuals. Many of these projects are driven by a desire for archaeology to meet a range of perceived educational and social values in bringing about knowledge and awareness of the past in the present. These are often claimed as successful outputs of community projects. This paper argues that appropriate criteria and methodologies for evaluating the efficacy of these projects have yet to be designed. What is community archaeology for? Who is it for? And is it effectively meeting its targets? Focusing on the authors' experiences of directing community archaeology projects, together with the ongoing research assessing the efficacy of community archaeology projects in the UK, this paper aims to set out two possible methodologies: one of self-reflexivity, and one of ethnoarchaeological analysis for evaluating what community archaeology actually does for communities themselves.     

Archaeology in the Lettered City

The ‘lettered creole’ Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora is widely seen as an antiquarian who collected textual materials associated with the indigenous past. But Sigüenza's historical interest exceeded both the textual and the indigenous. Following a popular insurrection in 1692, which left the viceroy's palace in ruins, Sigüenza was asked to present a proposal for segregating Mexico City into distinct Spanish and Indian zones. He framed his project not as an attempt to trace a new line but as the recuperation of an old one, ‘excavating’ the original plan laid out by Hernán Cortés. Drawing on recent work in the field of archaeology and proposing a revisionist history of Mexican archaeology, this essay reads Sigüenza's interventions in the wake of the uprising as articulating an ‘archaeology of the colonial present’ whose modalities include both digging and ‘walking in the city.’ This operation renders the Spanish city a colonial ruin to be curated by a creole administrative apparatus. For the first time, the Spanish present has become the colonial past.     

Community Archaeology as Knowledge Management: Reflections from Uneapa Island,Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Over the last decade the concept of community archaeology has become a worldwide phenomenon; a convenient tagline largely describing the involvement of non-archaeologists in the practice of interacting with, uncovering, interpreting, and presenting the past. A plethora of new definitions and methodologies have been postulated, a marked increase in public funds invested in such initiatives is notable, as is the development of more rigorous evaluation strategies. Using Etienne Wenger’s ideas about ‘communities of practice’ (1998), I argue that community archaeology can be conceived as a form of knowledge management. In doing so, this paper reflects on the interactions between a small research team and local community during six months fieldwork on Uneapa, a remote island in the Bismarck Sea, Papua New Guinea. It considers the sets of relations that emerged whilst fi?eld-walking, surveying, and excavating Uneapa’s monumental landscape, and discusses how local ideas and knowledge influenced and altered the project methodologies and research questions being asked. This paper also highlights the challenges faced when reifying such engagements into research outputs.     

Finding Russia in Botswana: AIDS,Archaeology, and the Power of the Ancestors

The materialization of memory is one way in which the past becomes a powerful agent for negotiating the present. Today in Botswana, archaeological sites have become sites of memory where ancestors have been invoked for healing in response to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. This paper concentrates on one site, Khubu la Dint?a, where a local community practiced an ancestral healing ceremony, phekolo, as a way to restore spiritual balance. Told through a set of narratives that integrate ethnographic interviews with one of the former church elders, Russia, the article chronicles the trajectory of the church, the perceived power and active role of the ancestors in this ceremony, and the complex web of morality and practicality in which alternative narratives emerge during a time of social disruption and later fall apart. This paper complements the others in this issue by focusing on how memory, place, time, and material culture are recursively engaged: a process that includes formal and accepted to marginal and even ephemeral viewpoints and holds lessons for how we as archaeologists approach and curate the past.     

The Azazo Project: Archaeology and the Community in Ethiopia

Abstract

In this article we discuss the motivations, aims, and preliminary results of working with a local community in Ethiopia. Trying to escape from the (neo)colonial archaeology that is still practised in Africa, this project aims to achieve a cooperative and participative archaeology. This work with the community has been one of our main priorities in our last seasons, and although we have focused on elementary school and university students, we have opened up a number of different paths to follow in future years. The experience has been very positive, and engagement with local people has helped us to create awareness about the importance of cultural heritage, hopefully ensuring the future protection of the sites.     

Landscape Archaeology,Heritage and the Community in Devon: An Oral History Approach

In the context of recent media, governmental, academic and popular attention and enthusiasm for debates surrounding the construction and meaning of the British countryside, this paper outlines the potential for oral history to make a contribution. Working in Devon, the authors outline how an oral history methodology can engage with the fields of landscape archaeology and heritage studies. As well as augmenting and supporting more traditional approaches to landscape, oral history techniques can be used to challenge and destabilise existing knowledge, thereby moving the process of ‘democratisation’ in knowledge construction of the rural landscape from practices of scientific ‘complicity’ towards one of critical engagement.