Tales of Gotham, Historical Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Microhistory of New York City

376 Pages·2013·8.91 MB·English

by  Meta F. Janowitz

Tales of Gotham, Historical Archaeology,
Ethnohistory and Microhistory of New York City

Meta F. Janowitz (cid:129) Diane Dallal
Editors
Tales of Gotham,
Historical Archaeology,
Ethnohistory
and Microhistory
of New York City
Editors
Meta F. Janowitz Diane Dallal
URS Corporation, Burlington, NJ, USA AKRF, Inc.
New York, NY, USA
School of Visual Arts , New York, NY, USA
ISBN 978-1-4614-5271-3 ISBN 978-1-4614-5272-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5272-0
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012952587
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This book is dedicated to our mothers, Hilda
Heines Fayden Runz and Beatrice Lee
Pickus Nach.
If we forget about them, we’re just a lot of
people living in buildings. We need them to
tell us who we are. They built this city. They
did all the daft human things that turn a lot
of buildings into a place for people. It’s
wrong to throw all that away.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead

Foreword
City Lives: Archaeological Tales from Gotham
In this volume a group of scholars who have devoted much of their careers to the
archaeology of New York City and its greater environs turn their attention to detailed
examinations of individual lives and “archaeological biographies” of a wide array
of persons who once lived in what is now New York. The authors did not invent
these New York stories—they are not fi ctional or imaginary but grounded in scrupu-
lous, detailed examinations and interpretations of documentary and archaeological
evidence.
Archaeologists become entangled with past lives initially through the sites they
excavate—selected for excavation not by the archaeologist in pursuit of his or her
own research agenda but because of pending destruction through development—
and the artifacts they bring back to their labs to analyze and interpret. They become
inadvertent biographers of overlooked and little-known people as they delve into
documentary and pictorial sources to try to piece together and make vivid the char-
acters who once occupied a given site, and who may have purchased, owned, used,
and discarded items of everyday life (see, e.g., Beaudry 2 008 ).
Those who consider archaeology to be a “human science” tend to think that
archaeologists should make the results of their work accessible to non-archaeolo-
gists. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but one of the most effective
means of communicating the results of our work is through writing compelling
narratives that go beyond reporting on the technical details of an excavation and of
the fi nds it produces. Historical archaeology is an open-ended, interdisciplinary
pursuit that operates outside of the bounds of any single theoretical program and
that incorporates bold forays into the worlds of documentary analysis and material
culture studies. The purposeful combination of multiple approaches and theoretical
perspectives represents a way of experimenting and even playing with archaeologi-
cal data, much as musicians in creating what falls loosely under the rubric of “world
music” practice a kind of “reckless eclecticism” that results in new and engaging
vii
viii Foreword
forms of music. Hybridity and eclecticism both in archaeological theory and
practice strengthen our fi eld.
W e can see eclecticism and creativity in the manifold ways that archaeological
storytellers have crafted their “stories.” In the volume “Archaeologists as Storytellers”
(Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1 998 ), authors employ a variety of techniques to present
their data in the form of compelling narratives: letter-writing, diary -keeping, inter-
views, fi rst-person monologue, boring conference paper interrupted by the irate
subject of said paper, oral histories, and fi ctional vignettes. Contributors to Tales of
Gotham likewise tell their stories in different ways, though for the most part they
muster their data up front and present carefully referenced and annotated stories that
can readily be seen as both factual and plausible.
Critics of archaeological storytelling express concern that researchers just make
up stories and that this is irresponsible because there is no formal method that
underlies the construction of alternative narratives of the past, fi ctional or otherwise.
Underlying this critique is the general sense of uneasiness many archaeologists have
about the post-processualist fl irtation with deconstructionism, which spawned a
brief fl urry of works that insisted that there are so many possible readings of a text,
an event, or any sort of evidence that there was no hope of ever arriving at the sort
of consensus around meaning so fervently wished for by archaeologists trained in
normal science. Both the excesses of deconstructionism and of what Bruce Trigger
( 1988 :402) referred to as hyper-relativism in archaeology have been largely discred-
ited and abandoned, but deconstructionism as developed by the French philosopher
Derrida (1 978 ) nevertheless left a lasting imprint on postmodern thinking by making
us aware that texts are subject to multiple interpretations and that meaning is both
context-driven and fl uid. Interpretive archaeologists hence are interested in mean-
ings in the plural. Our understanding of events in the past changes along with our
points of vantage and ways of communicating about events, and explanations of the
whys and wherefores of what went on in the past are successive rather than fi xed.
Rosemary Joyce in T he Languages of Archaeology writes “that archaeological
writing is storytelling is a commonplace observance by now, although it continues
to be resisted . . . even archaeologists most sympathetic to this point have for the
most part overlooked the storytelling that is purely internal to our discipline and that
precedes the formalization of stories in lectures, books, museum exhibitions, vid-
eos, or electronic media.” Joyce notes that our archaeological productions are not
and can never be merely transcriptions of what is in the ground; all forms of archae-
ological transcription involve negotiation of meaning, a “re-presentation of some
things in the present as traces of other things in the past” (Joyce 2002 : 4–5). In other
words, all archaeology is storytelling; all archaeological narratives are constructed.
The narratives we produce as well as those we receive vary according to who is
negotiating meaning, with whom, and under what circumstances.
Experimental and alternative narrative in archaeology can involve construction
of fi ctional accounts. I have myself indulged in the production of just such a fi ction,
albeit a fi ction that was scrupulously based on what we might think of as facts: data
drawn from the archaeological record, documentary evidence, everything I could
bring to bear both as direct and indirect evidence to tether my fi ctional narrative as
Foreword ix
closely to, if not truth, and then evidence as I interpreted it (Beaudry 1998 ).
Producing that fi ctional narrative was one of the most dif fi cult writing tasks I have
undertaken because I felt I had to cleave closely to the evidence and “get everything
right,” as it were, so that the narrative would be credible and seamless. I could not
allow myself all the may-have-beens, might bes, perhapses, and on the other hands
with which I normally qualify the interpretations offered in technical reports. In
truth, I felt more constrained by the fi ctional armature than I am by the far less com-
pelling genre of report writing. As Charles Cheek notes in re fl ecting on his con-
structed “story” about Wiert Valentine, “I have had to take liberties with interpretations
that made sense to me, but may have been interpreted differently by another author.”
Archaeological storytellers are often so concerned that their narratives are plausible
that they forget that our colleagues could just as easily fi nd fault with our conclu-
sions based on straightforward (unimaginative?) archaeological reportage.
Not all archaeological storytellers elect to construct fi ctional narratives; Mary
and Adrian Praetzellis, in 1989 , proposed an approach they referred to as “archaeo-
logical biography” as a means of providing vivid portraits of women through the
combined contextual interpretation of painstakingly accumulated archaeological
and documentary evidence. Rebecca Yamin, whose archaeological tales of the Five
Points neighborhood of New York City were singled out for praise by urban histo-
rian Alan Mayne ( 2008) , makes the point that “Alternative narratives do not write
themselves, even from very good data” (Yamin 2001 :154). If we as historical
archaeologists hope to examine our data with fresh eyes and open minds and not
take for granted the stories constructed about our sites or the people who lived at
them that appear in the imaginative writings of nineteenth-century reformers and
muckrakers or of industrial apologists who wrote to justify exploitation of working
people like miners or textile workers, or of Colonial Revivalists who sought to
glorify early European immigrants to America, we must “employ equal amounts of
imagination” (2001:154). Yamin notes that “the interpretative approach to archaeo-
logical analysis begins the process, but it may not go far enough to create an alterna-
tive narrative, a narrative strong enough to communicate agency in a way that does
not seem trivial, or incidental” (Ibid.). Yamin takes inspiration from Carmel Schrire’s
work (1996) on a seventeenth-century Dutch outpost in South Africa; Schrire calls
for an “act of imagination” to connect the data to real life. As Yamin puts it, narra-
tive in this sense becomes a method of interpretation (2001:163).
The approach is characterized by close readings of data drawn from multiple
lines of evidence in combination with informed imagination that situates people
within their time. The resulting narratives are grounded in recent historical scholar-
ship and though they might seem to be particularistic, in Yamin’s case they contribute
to an ongoing dialogue about the Five Points neighborhood and more broadly about
how and why it became “the archetypal slum”—and hence Yamin’s narratives of
Five Points originate with a microscopic examination of individuals and how they
negotiated meanings in their everyday lives, but in the aggregate the “vignettes”
that she produces speak more broadly to issues of how scholars have constructed
meanings around stereotypes of Five Points and other so-called slums, and hence in
the end the most personal narrative lends itself to a reconsideration of morphological