Unearthing Gotham
by Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall
What an extraordinary piece of work.
Begin with the revelation that New York City, built and rebuilt as it has been, contains a great number of archaeological sites. Who knew? Then make the startling decision to begin the story as the last Ice Age was ending; two-fifths of the book deals with people and events before even Henry Hudson came. Go on to detail how urban archaeology got started in the city and what the participants have discovered (and inferred) about the geography, social organization and economic life of Manhattan since 1609. And end with a wrenching account of the discovery and preservation of the African Burial Ground.
This is a compelling book full of astounding new information (new to me). The Lenape people who lived in the area from southern New England to the Chesapeake—the English called them Delaware Indians, and the group living in modern N.Y. City called themselves Munsee—started walking west when the pressure of European settlement became too great, leaving behind tribal names at Muncie, Indiana, Munceytown, Ontario, and Lenapah, Oklahoma, where some of their descendants live today. The first Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam were actually Huguenots. A third of the width of Lower Manhattan wasn't there when the Dutch arrived; it's been created by landfilling operations. Until well into the 1800s, people had both privies and water-supply cisterns buried in their back yards. Africans, mostly enslaved, buried their loved ones according to traditions they brought from home.
But it is not the individual facts that Cantwell and Wall set forth here that make reading this work such a hair-raising experience; it is their skill and care in telling the story they have learned by digging in the city. People chose to live there for this reason and that reason; they brought these things with them and created those others; they lived with their neighbors in such and such a way; they gained and lost by their choices; they left their things, in some cases themselves, behind; people today can receive all their traces as a kind of one-way communication, and we respond to that message in ways the earlier folks could never have expected. This is a rather soppy response to what is, it's only fair to say, a rather hard-nosed and unsentimental book (except for the last chapter).
Unearthing Gotham is richly illustrated with drawings, maps and photographs. It is a treasure, cheap at forty bucks. Read it.
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Unearthing Gotham