Digging into New York's Past

Observations of an Urban Archaeologist

People in New York tend to live for the moment and the future," says Professor Diana diZerega Wall of the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and City College. "They don't really look to the past very much."

Being an urban archaeologist, when she speaks of the past, Wall means the distant past. In her view, the story of New York City begins 11,000 years ago, when the first people moved into the area, after the last glacier from the last ice age melted. At this point, New York was not even on the coast--that was 100 miles to the east, on what is now the Continental Shelf of the Atlantic Ocean.

"I think of these people as the city's first immigrants," she says of the small, itinerant population who were the first to make New York their home.

Between those early Native American inhabitants and the modern-day metropolis, there exists a mind-boggling number of layers and epochs to sift through in putting together a total archaeological picture of the city. Wall's 2001 book, Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (Yale University Press), co-authored with Marie Cantwell of Rutgers University, did just that: it treated New York City as one big archaeological site, providing a comprehensive view of the peoples and cultures that have shared this piece of land, from the Paleoindian Period to the 19th century. The book was co-winner of the 2002 Society for American Archaeology Book Award and also won the New York Society Library's 2002 Book Award for History.

Her forthcoming book, Touring Gotham's Archaeological Past: 8 Self-Guided Walking Tours Through New York City (Yale University Press), also co-authored with Cantwell, will guide people through many of the discoveries archaeologists have made, with tours of lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village, the Bronx, and Inwood (her favorite, where there are Native American sites and Revolutionary War camps).

For those interested in looking back--past the Koch administration, past the great skyscrapers of the 1930s, or the construction of the subway 100 years ago--what is there to see?

New York City, taken as a "site," is made up of numerous smaller sites, including, for example, "an English colonial tavern in lower Manhattan, an eight-thousand-year-old Indian settlement on Staten Island, a colonial farm in Queens, a seventeenth-century Indian community in the Bronx, nineteenth-century middle-class homes in Brooklyn, or an eighteenth-century African cemetery on Broadway" (from Unearthing Gotham, p.4). Wall worked on some of these sites herself.

From 1979 to the mid to late 1980s, it was a boom time for construction in the city, and, consequently, a great time for archaeology. Because of environmental regulations, before any large-scale excavations are begun, a project must undergo a review process, which includes asking such questions as, "Who lived there? Who worked there? Could there have been a native American presence in that part of the city?," says Wall. This is often an opportunity for archaeologists to gain access to sites that have long been buried.

"I worked on the first large-scale excavation in lower Manhattan, called the Stadt Huys Block," she says. "That was a test case. The question was, 'Could there be archaeological remains buried in the old city, which is the Wall Street district. I looked on it as one of the most urbanized parts of the world, and I found the idea that there could be a past buried there very exciting."

It turned out that there were remains--lots of them. ("We didn't know that when we went in. We were very nervous about whether there'd be anything left or not," she says.) The archaeologists in Wall's team discovered a foundation wall and a trove of artifacts associated with a tavern built in 1670, called the Kings Tavern. Among the underground remnants were tens of thousands of clay tobacco pipes, wine bottles, and rum bottles. The result was a picture of Colonial life frozen in time: "Just looking at the artifacts you got the impression of people sitting around in a tavern, drinking and smoking and bending their elbows for one thing or another." The project was significant, Wall says, because it demonstrated that very old archaeological sites could be found in lower Manhattan, and led the way for other digs.

Another site at 7 Hanover Square revealed a landfill containing artifacts from the 1600s and earlier, including Native American artifacts. Her favorite artifacts from this landfill, she says, were soles of shoes: "What's so touching about them, is that they didn't have footedness. There was no left and right."

When you dig into New York City, it seems, there's no telling what you will find. What is now Washington Square Park was a potter's field during the yellow fever epidemic of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Parks Department gardeners sometimes extract human bones. At one site, an entire ship was covered in a landfill. At another, a set of wooden wharves, constructed in the 1790s ("like Lincoln Logs") was found. And one now-famous site in Lower Manhattan, excavated by a team of archaeologists in 1991 when a new federal government building was to be built, revealed an African burial ground from the 1700s, giving physical evidence to a repressed history of slavery in the city.

"We tend to deny the fact that that there was slavery in the North," says Wall. In fact, "of all the cities in the British colonies in America, New York's population of enslaved Africans was second only to that of Charleston, South Carolina."

What is so important about a site like the African burial ground, she says, is that it is so tangible: "It hits people right between the eyes...you can't deny the fact that slavery was here." In her own research over the years, she has been interested in the roles of women, and encountering physical objects has brought her closer to the facts of women's lives: "When archaeologists dig, they dig up pot shards, but what pot shards are are dishes that women used to set their tables." These pieces of seeming junk, that archaeologists collect and study in their labs, offer clues to important anthropological information such as how food was served and stored in a particular place and time.

"You get this very material approach to the past, which I find extremely alluring," she says. "For me, touching these objects--unlike in museums, where you can't touch anything--I feel as if I'm getting in contact with the past and people."

Besides the objects, another important tool to the urban archaeologist is access to documents: tax records, census reports, and city directories. Wall has been able to gather such information about the inhabitants of a particular site, and construct a rich picture of life in that place and time. On one site, for example, she discovered the basement of a merchant who lost his store in the Great Fire of 1835. What was left were the bottoms of the merchant's barrels and crates, some with coffee beans, grapes, and wine bottles still in them.

"We were able to look this guy up in city directories," says Wall of the merchant. "We knew his name, because we knew the property....It was Anthony Winans. We also saw that he'd opened up another grocery shop again, by the next year. There he was again, a block away. He demonstrated incredible resilience after this disaster. The face of the city was destroyed, and somehow he finds the wherewithal to start again."

This is just one story. Wall's new book of walking tours will lead readers through multiple tales, characters, dwellings, and time periods--some overlapping on the same street--spanning 11,000 years of human presence here. Looking at New York City archaeologically gives us a richer, deeper view of the past. As Wall's work shows, it might be right below our feet.