Digging the Citys Past
metropoliss archaeological heritage. Adapted here is a part of the authors Conclusion to this extensively illustrated study, titled Common Ground.
Because of all its varied natural and cultural histories, New York City became a major American archaeological site as it spread for 325 miles over the traces of its earlier residents.
Scores of smaller sitescemeteries, inland encampments, forts, ossuaries, warehouses, shellfishing communities, wharves, dog burials, battlefields, workshops, scuttled ships, taverns, plantations, cornfields, landfills, almshouses, suburban backyards, hunting grounds, and towns and villagesmake up the larger site that is the city itself.
With equal intimacy, these material remains evoke countless ceremonies that gave meaning to the lives of those who once celebrated them on this common ground. There were smoking rituals that linked the inhabitants with the spiritual world, domestic rituals of family dinners and company teas, rites of health and death in which dogs played major roles, and, over and over again, the somber rituals of mourning, be they performed by relatives filling a six-year-old childs grave with wealth, families gathering the bones of their long-dead relatives for reburial, or enslaved families burying their dead at night outside the citys walls.
The study of an archaeological site like New York City is far from parochial. Because of the sites great time depth, size, complex human and natural history, and impact on the world outside its borders, the archaeology of New York reaches well beyond local history to address more universal aspects of human experience.
The meanings embedded in these artifacts, features, and human burials shed new light on the development of capitalism and the global economy, the social constructions of community and landscape, and the development of sedentary and urban ways of life. These archaeological finds tell us of things we never knew, remind us of those we are proud to remember, and testify to those we prefer to forget.
In this chronicle of the ever-changing history of an American city, we have tried, as one anthropologist put it, to speak the past into being, to summon it with words and give it dramatic form by forging ancestral worlds in which others can participate and readily lose themselves. New Yorks archaeological discoveries, its ancestral worlds, have, we believe, significance for the modern world. They are literally formed into local pride, a sense of place, and even legend, all of which are important in todays often rootless and restless world.
In appreciating these discoveries, some people may simply find themselves agreeing with Mr. Sammler, Saul Bellows protagonist, that everyone needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
For others, these ancestral worlds may take on added importance as they are recast into powerful symbolsas, for example, happened when Delaware Indian spiritual leaders from Oklahoma and Canada gathered at Ellis Island in 1987 for a blessing ceremony honoring the remains of their ancestors. Ellis Island is part of what was once Lenapehoking, the Delawares ancestral homeland.
The present is so deeply rooted in the past that, as many have argued, it can be difficult to know where you are, let alone where you are going, unless you first know where you have been. We believe that the archaeological record bears singular witness to where we all once were. The finds unearthed beneath the modern city reveal the many and diverse routes that earlier peoples followed, each path leading, in its own way, to the creation of the modern city that is New York.
In writing this narrative, we have tried to build strong connections between all those who shared the land in the past and those who have now inherited it. We believe that we are all, as Abraham Lincoln said, heirs to a great estate. For us, that great estate is the past, which belongs to everyone. It is truly common ground.
Yet the archaeological record, like the land itself, is inherited from previous generations and is only temporarily owned by us. It will soon belong to our descendants. As Willa Cather wrote in O Pioneers!, We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own itfor a little while.
And so, with the inheritance come responsibilities. We know from bitter experience just how fragile archaeological sites are and how easily they and all the information in them can be irrevocably lost. Sites that are destroyed are gone forever.
We hope that all the heirs will work together to protect and cherish the buried past so that it can be passed on to succeeding generations. They are the ones who will build on that collective heritage, redefine it, and take pride in it. We hope that it will give as much meaning and pleasure to their lives as it has to ours.