ancient cities

846 Urban Archaeology
Nation Building and the Exclusion
of Minority Groups
Archaeology has been used for nation building,
and two of the most famous illustrations are
Mexico and modern Israel. However, nationalism
is not a past phenomenon. Nationalism often
involves taking one group in an old set of provinces,
now a new nation, and making it dominant
in many ways, often by comparing it to
“inferior” groups. Particular groups became new
colonial entities, such as Jews through newly
nationalist Europe, Communists, Gypsies, immigrants,
American Chinese in the late nineteenth
century, and Japanese Americans during World
War II. These groups, often urban, were defined as
seditious and were sometimes watched as a new,
potential danger to the state. This watching often
occurred in camps, which were guarded enclaves
or enclosures, leading sometimes to the wholesale
death of newly defined minorities. Urban archaeologists
study this process.
The newest initiative in urban archaeology is
the exploration of the internment camp. Built in
the name of national security, these are places that
contain groups of people excluded, by the state,
from their rights and citizenship. This category
includes South African townships under Apartheid,
German concentration camps, and the more recent
examples of isolation and imprisonment by Pol Pot
in Cambodia, Pinochet in Chile, and the United
States at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Urban Archaeology in the United States
Virtually all of the properties of urban archaeology
can be illustrated by the post–World War II excavations
of New York City. Recovered remains
include virtually all prehistoric eras and cover the
ecological relationships developed in each. Hunter
gatherers and agriculturalists lived in the area that
is now New York City for 10,000 years before
Europeans arrived. Because of the attention to climatological
and ecological relationships, archaeologists
show stable resources, a growing population,
and shifting uses of available foods, but little destruction
of land or living species, aside from what happened
during the terminal Pleistocene. The remains
of the Dutch, English, and Americans have been
explored in the archaeology of New York. There
are substantial remains representing each culture
and period. The archaeology from the mid-
sixteenth century to today shows European populations
have increased in number, land has been
built up, and social relations have stratified. The
archaeology also shows environmental degradation,
the deliberate creation of slum housing, dangerous
living conditions, and widespread use of
slave labor in the city.
Rebecca Yamin’s analysis of the archaeology of
Philadelphia is organized around city founder
William Penn’s idea of equality, or “Brotherly
Love.” The city’s original squares, the area around
Independence Hall, the African American neighborhoods,
slavery, and the famous panoptic prison
(the Eastern State Penitentiary) are all about equality,
its failures, and the efforts to restore the local
Quaker-inspired idea of Brotherly Love. More
than a hundred separate excavations have been
conducted in Philadelphia over the past 60 years,
and through them, the city’s founding ideals and
failures to live up to those ideals have been linked
through popular interpretation. One excavation in
Philadelphia revealed a home for women who
were to be reintegrated into society, the Magdalene
Society Asylum. While working near Independence
Hall, archaeologists exposed evidence of slaveholding
and impoverished free African Americans.
Excavated escape routes from the Bentham-inspired
prison made a commentary on the failure of these
equalizing and reforming institutions whose aim
was good citizenship within a democracy.
Urban archaeology in America has started to
develop in many cities, primarily in the form of
cultural resource management projects. These
projects are most frequently defined as a necessary
legal step in the development of a given area, as
opposed to being research driven. However, in the
past 25 years or so, programs with a scholarly
emphasis have been gaining support within certain
urban communities. An example of this is
Archaeology in Annapolis, a program started in
1981. Fieldwork uncovered streets that predate
the written records of the city. Despite references
to Annapolis being designed in the baroque style,
little geometric physical evidence survived.
Archaeologists discovered how irregular and nonparallel
street lines were due to their focused vistas
on sites of power. In addition, there have been
multiple discoveries that speak to cultural and