Synopses & Reviews
This prize-winning book looks at New York from a fascinating new perspective, an archaeological one. Describing the exciting discoveries of long lost worlds found beneath the modern metropolis, the authors present an absorbing narrative of the many peoples who shared and shaped the land that is now New York City, including nineteenth-century families, Dutch and English colonists, enslaved Africans, and the Native Americans who arrived eleven thousand years ago.
Synopsis
Under the teeming metropolis that is present-day New York City lie the buried remains of long-lost worlds. The remnants of nineteenth-century New York reveal much about its inhabitants and neighborhoods, from fashionable Washington Square to the notorious Five Points. Underneath there are traces of the Dutch and English colonists who arrived in the area in the seventeenth century, as well as of the Africans they enslaved. And beneath all these layers is the land that Native Americans occupied for hundreds of generations from their first arrival eleven thousand years ago. Now two distinguished archaeologists draw on the results of more than a century of excavations to relate the interconnected stories of these different peoples who shared and shaped the land that makes up the modern city.
In treating New York's five boroughs as one enormous archaeological site, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall weave Native American, colonial, and post-colonial history into an absorbing, panoramic narrative. They also describe the work of the archaeologists who uncovered this evidence--nineteenth-century pioneers, concerned citizens, and today's professionals. In the process, Cantwell and Wall raise provocative questions about the nature of cities, urbanization, the colonial experience, Indian life, the family, and the use of space. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Unearthing Gotham offers a fresh perspective on the richness of the American legacy.
Synopsis
Relatively few books about American archaeology take a major metropolis like New York and attempt to piece together its long and complex history, but this book does just that. Approaching New York just as you would any other archaeological site, Cantwell and diZerega Wall trace the history, and archaeology, of its inhabitants from c.11,000 BO to what is termed Colonial New York. The scope of this book takes the reader from the first paleoindians, who occupied the lakes, marshes and forests that were already home to species of caribou, moose, mammoth and elk, through to the modern sprawling city that is renowned worldwide. This study ably combines discussions of significant sites and finds with more general overviews of the long occupation of this, the oldest major city in the United States'.