New York – Those who love New York know it as an ever-changing city, where a neighborhood can take on a new character in a matter of weeks and the sight of digging workers usually signals the coming of a new apartment building or office tower.
But from the far reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx to Central Park, the citys green heart, a few persistent researchers are poking under soil and concrete not to build the skyscrapers of the future but to strengthen the citys connection with its past.
These urban archaeologists are hunting for centuries-old dishware, toys, garbage dumps and chamber pots any bits of history that will add color and detail to New Yorkers understanding of the lives of those who came before.
“New York is a city thats always concerned with the present and looking to the future,” said Diana Wall, a City College anthropologist who has participated in excavations all over the city. Archaeology “provides an historical depth to this place in a very immediate sense,” she said.
Sifting through the soil of a big, crowded city in a relatively young country poses challenges far different from those faced in the far-flung locales more commonly associated with archaeology – Egypt, Greece, Israel.
Many New York sites have been destroyed by construction, and researchers must often probe through the complicated underground infrastructure of water pipes, sewers, and power lines that keeps the city running. Sometimes work schedules even have to be planned around traffic.
“Youve got to deal with the concrete, the pipes, all the modern intrusions that can really mess up a site,” said Christopher Ricciardi, a Syracuse University graduate student working on a dig in the Marine Park-Flatlands section of Brooklyn. “Every now and then youve got to rent a jackhammer.”
But the rewards can be great – a clearer view of 18th and 19th century lives in a city where history is often drowned out by bustle and business. Archaeologists say their work can provide valuable details about the everyday existence of those who didnt make it into the history books, especially minorities, women, workers and the poor.
In one of the biggest New York finds, an 18th century cemetery now called the African Burial Ground was discovered in 1991 during the construction of a federal office building in lower Manhattan. Some 10,000 to 20,000 people are believed to have been buried there, far more than historians previously thought.
And in the financial district, the remains of a scuttled ship from the mid-1700s were unearthed when workers began building an office tower in the 1980s.
This summer, nine interns supervised by researchers from City College, Barnard College and the New-York Historical Society searched Central Park for clues about Seneca Village, a settlement of free blacks and Irish immigrants who were forced out in 1857 to make way for the park.
Working in a sliver of the parks west side, the students marked off plots of grass with white tape and peeked under the soil with ground-penetrating radar and instruments that use electrical conductivity and resistivity to find objects in the earth.
The interns, whose findings are being loaded into computers for analysis by project leaders, did not break any ground in the park. Their aim was simply to locate areas that might be worth digging.
Nan Rothschild, a Barnard anthropology professor who is one of several researchers involved in the study, said its not yet clear what the team has found. She and her colleagues hope to make excavation plans once they examine the surveys results and obtain permits from the city. If all goes well, she said, limited digging could start in fall 2001.
The team hopes buried artifacts will fill in gaps in historians knowledge about Seneca Village, which was viewed by some in the past as a settlement for vagabonds and squatters.
But Rothschild said tax, church and census records have since shown the area between 82nd and 89th streets on the parks west side was a stable community of several hundred people, families who owned land and held jobs.
“African-Americans did own property,” said Ericka Haskins, 27, a junior at the Borough of Manhattan Community College who worked on the project. “They werent just vagrants.”
Seneca Village boasted several churches and a school, as well as small shops like a grocery and a barrel-maker, Rothschild said. The researchers hope to find the remains of basements, wells, garbage dumps and household items like dishes and bottles.
Digging can also provide details about families like the wealthy Lotts of Brooklyn, whose land the Syracuse researcher Ricciardi is helping to excavate.
The Lott project is sponsored by Brooklyn College and led by Arthur Bankoff, chairman of the schools archaeology and anthropology department. Its aim is to learn more about the rural history of this most urban city.
The digging is painstaking. Peeling back layers of soil with small trowels and brushes, the researchers hunt for shards of glass or clay that are usually less than two inches wide. For every three weeks of fieldwork, they can spend as long as nine months on laboratory analysis.
“Its like doing the ultimate jigsaw puzzle,” Ricciardi said.
The Lotts, who came from Holland when New York was still New Amsterdam, bought their 250 acres in southeast Brooklyn in 1719, for 2,100 British pounds. The family sold their land piece by piece over the years, but kept the farm operating until about 1925. A relative occupied the main house until 1989.
The surrounding Flatlands were largely rural until the late 1920s, when the city sewer and water systems arrived, making dense residential development possible.
Bankoff says that once artifacts from the Lott land are analyzed, they could provide insights into New Yorks evolution from farmland to city. One of his teams early findings – a glass egg used to stimulate unproductive hens – gave members a vivid reminder of the areas earthy past.
For Ricciardi, it demonstrated archaeologys ability to bring history home.
“Everybody thinks we know everything [about New Yorks past] because the documents tell us,” he said. “Documents, in a sense, are like reading a table of contents. … Archaeology is in a perfect position to piece together all the background and the guts of a story.”
