Tales of Gotham, Historical Archaeology,

Ethnohistory and Microhistory of New York City

Meta F. Janowitz • Diane Dallal
Editors

Tales of Gotham,
Historical Archaeology,
Ethnohistory
and Microhistory
of New York City
Editors
Meta F. Janowitz Diane Dallal
URS Corporation, Burlington, NJ, USA AKRF, Inc.
New York, NY, USA
School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-1-4614-5271-3 ISBN 978-1-4614-5272-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5272-0
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London

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This book is dedicated to our mothers, Hilda
Heines Fayden Runz and Beatrice Lee
Pickus Nach.

If we forget about them, we’re just a lot of

people living in buildings. We need them to
tell us who we are. They built this city. They
did all the daft human things that turn a lot
of buildings into a place for people. It’s
wrong to throw all that away.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
Foreword

City Lives: Archaeological Tales from Gotham

In this volume a group of scholars who have devoted much of their careers to the
archaeology of New York City and its greater environs turn their attention to detailed
examinations of individual lives and “archaeological biographies” of a wide array
of persons who once lived in what is now New York. The authors did not invent
these New York stories—they are not fictional or imaginary but grounded in scrupu-
lous, detailed examinations and interpretations of documentary and archaeological
evidence.
Archaeologists become entangled with past lives initially through the sites they
excavate—selected for excavation not by the archaeologist in pursuit of his or her
own research agenda but because of pending destruction through development—
and the artifacts they bring back to their labs to analyze and interpret. They become
inadvertent biographers of overlooked and little-known people as they delve into
documentary and pictorial sources to try to piece together and make vivid the char-
acters who once occupied a given site, and who may have purchased, owned, used,
and discarded items of everyday life (see, e.g., Beaudry 2008).
Those who consider archaeology to be a “human science” tend to think that
archaeologists should make the results of their work accessible to non-archaeolo-
gists. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but one of the most effective
means of communicating the results of our work is through writing compelling
narratives that go beyond reporting on the technical details of an excavation and of
the finds it produces. Historical archaeology is an open-ended, interdisciplinary
pursuit that operates outside of the bounds of any single theoretical program and
that incorporates bold forays into the worlds of documentary analysis and material
culture studies. The purposeful combination of multiple approaches and theoretical
perspectives represents a way of experimenting and even playing with archaeologi-
cal data, much as musicians in creating what falls loosely under the rubric of “world
music” practice a kind of “reckless eclecticism” that results in new and engaging

vii
viii Foreword

forms of music. Hybridity and eclecticism both in archaeological theory and

practice strengthen our field.
We can see eclecticism and creativity in the manifold ways that archaeological
storytellers have crafted their “stories.” In the volume “Archaeologists as Storytellers”
(Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1998), authors employ a variety of techniques to present
their data in the form of compelling narratives: letter-writing, diary-keeping, inter-
views, first-person monologue, boring conference paper interrupted by the irate
subject of said paper, oral histories, and fictional vignettes. Contributors to Tales of
Gotham likewise tell their stories in different ways, though for the most part they
muster their data up front and present carefully referenced and annotated stories that
can readily be seen as both factual and plausible.
Critics of archaeological storytelling express concern that researchers just make
up stories and that this is irresponsible because there is no formal method that
underlies the construction of alternative narratives of the past, fictional or otherwise.
Underlying this critique is the general sense of uneasiness many archaeologists have
about the post-processualist flirtation with deconstructionism, which spawned a
brief flurry of works that insisted that there are so many possible readings of a text,
an event, or any sort of evidence that there was no hope of ever arriving at the sort
of consensus around meaning so fervently wished for by archaeologists trained in
normal science. Both the excesses of deconstructionism and of what Bruce Trigger
(1988:402) referred to as hyper-relativism in archaeology have been largely discred-
ited and abandoned, but deconstructionism as developed by the French philosopher
Derrida (1978) nevertheless left a lasting imprint on postmodern thinking by making
us aware that texts are subject to multiple interpretations and that meaning is both
context-driven and fluid. Interpretive archaeologists hence are interested in mean-
ings in the plural. Our understanding of events in the past changes along with our
points of vantage and ways of communicating about events, and explanations of the
whys and wherefores of what went on in the past are successive rather than fixed.
Rosemary Joyce in The Languages of Archaeology writes “that archaeological
writing is storytelling is a commonplace observance by now, although it continues
to be resisted . . . even archaeologists most sympathetic to this point have for the
most part overlooked the storytelling that is purely internal to our discipline and that
precedes the formalization of stories in lectures, books, museum exhibitions, vid-
eos, or electronic media.” Joyce notes that our archaeological productions are not
and can never be merely transcriptions of what is in the ground; all forms of archae-
ological transcription involve negotiation of meaning, a “re-presentation of some
things in the present as traces of other things in the past” (Joyce 2002: 4–5). In other
words, all archaeology is storytelling; all archaeological narratives are constructed.
The narratives we produce as well as those we receive vary according to who is
negotiating meaning, with whom, and under what circumstances.
Experimental and alternative narrative in archaeology can involve construction
of fictional accounts. I have myself indulged in the production of just such a fiction,
albeit a fiction that was scrupulously based on what we might think of as facts: data
drawn from the archaeological record, documentary evidence, everything I could
bring to bear both as direct and indirect evidence to tether my fictional narrative as
Foreword ix

closely to, if not truth, and then evidence as I interpreted it (Beaudry 1998).
Producing that fictional narrative was one of the most difficult writing tasks I have
undertaken because I felt I had to cleave closely to the evidence and “get everything
right,” as it were, so that the narrative would be credible and seamless. I could not
allow myself all the may-have-beens, might bes, perhapses, and on the other hands
with which I normally qualify the interpretations offered in technical reports. In
truth, I felt more constrained by the fictional armature than I am by the far less com-
pelling genre of report writing. As Charles Cheek notes in reflecting on his con-
structed “story” about Wiert Valentine, “I have had to take liberties with interpretations
that made sense to me, but may have been interpreted differently by another author.”
Archaeological storytellers are often so concerned that their narratives are plausible
that they forget that our colleagues could just as easily find fault with our conclu-
sions based on straightforward (unimaginative?) archaeological reportage.
Not all archaeological storytellers elect to construct fictional narratives; Mary
and Adrian Praetzellis, in 1989, proposed an approach they referred to as “archaeo-
logical biography” as a means of providing vivid portraits of women through the
combined contextual interpretation of painstakingly accumulated archaeological
and documentary evidence. Rebecca Yamin, whose archaeological tales of the Five
Points neighborhood of New York City were singled out for praise by urban histo-
rian Alan Mayne (2008), makes the point that “Alternative narratives do not write
themselves, even from very good data” (Yamin 2001:154). If we as historical
archaeologists hope to examine our data with fresh eyes and open minds and not
take for granted the stories constructed about our sites or the people who lived at
them that appear in the imaginative writings of nineteenth-century reformers and
muckrakers or of industrial apologists who wrote to justify exploitation of working
people like miners or textile workers, or of Colonial Revivalists who sought to
glorify early European immigrants to America, we must “employ equal amounts of
imagination” (2001:154). Yamin notes that “the interpretative approach to archaeo-
logical analysis begins the process, but it may not go far enough to create an alterna-
tive narrative, a narrative strong enough to communicate agency in a way that does
not seem trivial, or incidental” (Ibid.). Yamin takes inspiration from Carmel Schrire’s
work (1996) on a seventeenth-century Dutch outpost in South Africa; Schrire calls
for an “act of imagination” to connect the data to real life. As Yamin puts it, narra-
tive in this sense becomes a method of interpretation (2001:163).
The approach is characterized by close readings of data drawn from multiple
lines of evidence in combination with informed imagination that situates people
within their time. The resulting narratives are grounded in recent historical scholar-
ship and though they might seem to be particularistic, in Yamin’s case they contribute
to an ongoing dialogue about the Five Points neighborhood and more broadly about
how and why it became “the archetypal slum”—and hence Yamin’s narratives of
Five Points originate with a microscopic examination of individuals and how they
negotiated meanings in their everyday lives, but in the aggregate the “vignettes”
that she produces speak more broadly to issues of how scholars have constructed
meanings around stereotypes of Five Points and other so-called slums, and hence in
the end the most personal narrative lends itself to a reconsideration of morphological
x Foreword

issues, that is, to critical examination of typological constructions about the past and
the present (Magnusson 2003), in this case, around the invention of places called
slums, about why we may have needed to invent slums, and about how the morpho-
logical class of places labeled slums has been used as a filter or screen to block out
our vision of the individuals who lived in such places.
Similarly, Lu Ann De Cunzo in her work in Delaware (2004) constructs a series
of alternative narratives about Delaware farms, farmers, farm families, and farm
laborers across economic, social, and racial lines. Her detailed historical ethnogra-
phies challenge the notion that there is a unitary phenomenon we can call “the cul-
ture of agriculture”; rather, De Cunzo reveals that in Delaware, as, presumably,
elsewhere in America, there were multiple “cultures” of agriculture. Historical
archaeologists can bring to light the many contexts in which people negotiated their
lives in the diverse communities of farmers, and it is our job to explode the myth of
the American farm as a unitary morphological type.
Because it begins with a focus on the small scale and the everyday, microhistory
is often highly biographical in its approach. Microhistorians investigate the inti-
mate details of the lives of their subjects, to the extent that at times they seem to
have become enamored of the people who are the actors in their historical dramas
and even to identify with them (Lepore 2001). Darnton (2004:61) refers to the basic
method microhistorians employ, which he refers to as incident analysis. He notes
that most microhistories start with an event and employ something of a detective’s
cleverness and insight to expose the underlying meanings of supposedly single
events that are actually part of a chain of events situated in a particular historical
context that are experienced and recounted by individuals who have differing back-
grounds, motivations, and standpoints.
The forensic metaphor is apt for archaeologists; examining an archaeological
site and analyzing what it produces often resembles crime scene investigation,
because our work often begins with the “scene of the crime” as it were and we have
a battery of methods that allow us to understand how our sites were formed and
perhaps how things got to be in the ground in just the way we find them, and of
course we have the privilege of access to more secrets about people’s lives than
historians will find in all the world’s archives. The problem is to take the obvious
and the not-so-obvious and situate both in the contexts of the lives of the people
whom we are studying and then try to understand what a particular congeries of
artifacts and other evidence is telling us about what it all meant to those people. This
forces us to construct narratives that do more than just tack back and forth between
sources but that weave together the various strands of evidence into strong cables of
inference (Wylie 1999).
Microhistory, or microhistorical archaeology, begins with a focus on the small
scale and the everyday and, as seen in the chapters in this book, tends to be highly
biographical in its approach. Here, “archaeological biographies” provide vivid por-
traits of women such as Sara Roeloffse (Janowitz), Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer
and Alida Schuyler van Rensselaer Livingston (Rothschild), and Ann Elizabeth Staats
Schuyler (Geismar). Here the archaeologists’ work with objects and sites leads them
to the archives in attempts to elucidate the material lives of the people who lived at
Foreword xi

their sites but who did not play a starring role in history as written by historians—but
the archaeologists’ work recovers their biographies and, through examining the
particularities of a single life, bring us closer to an understanding of the “worlds”
these people inhabited; these material histories are one of the chief mechanisms for
bringing the lives of women to the forefront, lives that often prove to have been
perhaps representative but far from ordinary (cf. Krohn and Miller 2009). We also
meet cartman Wiert Valentine (Cheek), Mayor Stephen Allen (Harris); the inti-
mately known but nevertheless still largely anonymous H.W. (Howson); the artisa-
nal Van Voorhis family (Wall); and groups formed from common purpose and
commensality (Morgan, Pipes) or through communal interment after a life of hard
work and disenfranchisement (LaRoche). All of these stories have been brought to
light through the combined contextual interpretation of painstakingly accumulated
archaeological and documentary evidence.
A microhistorical, biographical approach affords historical archaeologists an
aesthetic apprehension of their subjects’ lives because it allows them to address the
experience of the perceiving individual, the collective construction of meaning, and
how objects structure experience. An aesthetic or emotional archaeology attends to
the production, circulation, consumption, representativeness, and symbolic charac-
ter of objects and to how recovering the context of an object can change our under-
standing of the historical moment. Such studies recognize the methodological
interdependency of data-, text-, and object-based analyses, acknowledging intertex-
tuality—the relationship among the various lines of evidence that inform us about
the distant past, the contemporary past, and the present (Beaudry 1995:4).
The tales from Gotham that follow are redolent in atmospherics, presenting the
sights, smells, noises, gardens, animals, buildings, and rubbish that characterized
New York over time; many of the essays emphasize how former residents of New
York experienced life in the city. Cantwell provides insight into New York’s first
people, the Munsee, and how their “world”—the landscape and all creatures living
in it—began to experience rapid change after first contact with the Dutch. That the
Dutch envisioned a very different “place” for dwelling than did the Munsee is made
clear by Schaefer in his discussion of how the Dutch construed the natural world in
terms of plants in service to people and how plants and medical preparations from
them in turn regulated the health and well-being and fashioned the bodies of humans.
Experience and movement are recurring themes linking the stories together; food,
health, and the body also feature prominently. These in turn are linked to themes
around identity, nationalism, and immigration as aspects of both colonial and post-
colonial experiences in early America. These archaeological biographies lead us
outward towards a wider examination of the social and cultural processes that
shaped New York and that are reshaping it today.
These stories of New York and New Yorkers are evocative; their power derives
from their focus on the personal and on persons in the contexts of the times and
places they inhabited. Traditional archaeological narratives do not bring us into
such close contact with past lives. The quantitative analysis of archaeological data,
no matter how telling the numbers might be, lacks the power found in these alterna-
tive narratives, because the data simply do not speak for themselves. Data may
xii Foreword

speak to archaeologists but they will not convince anyone else, because they have
no plot and tell no stories; microhistory is written “from a qualitative rather than a
quantitative perspective” (Ginsburg 1993:12). Here, the occasional “act of
imagination”—born largely out of the intimate familiarity these scholars have with
their subjects—connects the data to real life. Arriving at the most plausible of all the
possible interpretations is the ultimate aim of archaeological biography. Victor Buchli
(2000:11) has argued that it is in the superfluities and pluralities of experience, prac-
tice, and interpretation that contemporary historical archaeology finds strength. The
diverse essays in this volume are not just plausible but engaging and compelling, rich
in intimate and colorful portraits of the people and places of New York.

Mary C. Beaudry
Department of Anthropology,
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

References

Beaudry, M. C., 1995, Introduction: Ethnography in Retrospect. In The Written and the Wrought:
Complementary Sources in Historical Archaeology, ed. by Mary Ellin D’Agostino, Margo
Winer, Elizabeth Prine, and Eleanor Casella, 1–15. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers
79. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
Beaudry, M. C., 1998, Farm Journal: First Person, Four Voices. Historical Archaeology 32(1):
20–33.
Beaudry, M. C., 2006, Stories That Matter: Material Lives in 19th-Century Boston and Lowell,
Massachusetts, USA. In Cities in the World 1500–2000, ed. by A. Green & R. Leech, 249–268.
Maney Publishing, London.
Beaudry, M. C., 2008, “Above Vulgar Economy”: The Intersection of Historical Archaeology and
Microhistory in Writing Archaeological Biographies of Two New England Merchants. In Small
Worlds: Method and Meaning in Microhistory ed. by J. F. Brooks, C. R. N. DeCorse, and J.
Walton, 173–198. School of Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Buchli, V., 2000, An Archaeology of Socialism. Berg, Oxford.
Darnton, R., 2004, It Happened One Night. New York Review of Books, June 24:60–64.
De Cunzo, L. A., 2004, A Historical Archaeology of Delaware: People, Contexts, and the Cultures
of Agriculture. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
Derrida, J., 1978, Writing and Difference. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Ginsburg, C., 1993, Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It. Critical Inquiry
20(1): 10–35.
Joyce, R., 2002, The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing. Blackwell,
Oxford.
Krohn, D. L. and Miller, P. N., editors, 2009, Dutch New York Between East and West: The World
of Margrieta van Varick. Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material
Culture/New-York Historical Society, New York, and Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Lepore, J., 2001, Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography.
The Journal of American History 88(1): 129–144.
Magnússon, S. G., 2003, The Singularization of History: Social History and Microhistory within
the Postmodern State of Knowledge. Journal of Social History 36(3): 701–735.
Mayne, A., 2008, On the Edges of History: Reflections on Historical Archaeology. American
Historical Review 113(1): 93–118.
Foreword xiii

Praetzellis, M. & Praetzellis, A., 1989, Archaeological Biography: A Method for Interpreting
Women’s History. Paper presented at the 22nd annual meeting of the Society for Historical
Archaeology, Baltimore, MD.
Praetzellis, M. & Praetzellis, A., editors, 1998, Archaeologists as Storytellers. Historical
Archaeology 32(1) [thematic issue].
Schrire, C., 1996, Digging Through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist. University Press of
Virginia, Charlottesville.
Trigger, B. G., 1988, A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Wylie, A., 1999, Why Should Historical Archaeologists Study Capitalism? The Logic of Question
and Answer and the Challenge of Systemic Analysis. In Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism,
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Yamin, R., 2001, Alternative Narratives: Respectability at New York’s Five Points. In The
Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Adventures in Slumland, ed. by A. Mayne & T. Murray,
154–170. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Contents

Foreword ......................................................................................................... vii

Part I New Amsterdam: Americans and Europeans

1 New Amsterdam: Americans and Europeans,

Historical Background........................................................................... 3
Meta F. Janowitz and Diane Dallal
2 Penhawitz and Wampage and the Seventeenth-Century
World They Dominated ......................................................................... 7
Anne-Marie Cantwell
3 A Manhattan Hortus Medicus?: Healing Herbs
in Seventeenth-Century New Amsterdam ........................................... 31
Richard G. Schaefer

Part II Dutch Women in an English Colony

4 Dutch Women in an English Colony, Historical Background ............ 59

Meta F. Janowitz and Diane Dallal
5 Sara Roelofse, Matron of New Amsterdam ......................................... 65
Meta F. Janowitz
6 Maria and Alida: Two Dutch Women in the
English Hudson Valley ........................................................................... 89
Nan A. Rothschild
7 Ann Elizabeth Staats Schuyler, an Eighteenth-Century
Woman Who Helped Shape Manhattan .............................................. 105
Joan H. Geismar

xv
xvi Contents

Part III Africans in New York

8 Africans in New York, Historical Background.................................... 127

Meta F. Janowitz and Diane Dallal
9 The African Burial Ground in the Age of Revolution:
A Landscape in Transition .................................................................... 133
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
10 HW: Epitaph for a Working Man ........................................................ 159
Jean Howson
11 Finding Pinkster: The Ethnoarchaeology of Dancing
in the Street ............................................................................................. 179
Kate Tarlow Morgan

Part IV Merchants, Craftsmen, and Working Men

12 Merchants Craftsmen and Working Men,

Historical Background........................................................................... 205
Meta F. Janowitz and Diane Dallal
13 The Van Voorhis Family: Artisans in Post-Colonial
New York City ........................................................................................ 211
Diana diZerega Wall
14 John Zuricher, Stone Cutter, and His Imprint on the
Religious Landscape of Colonial New York......................................... 225
Sherene Baugher and Richard F. Veit
15 Wiert Valentine: Cartman of New York City Politics,
Food and Drink in Early Republican New York ................................. 249
Charles D. Cheek
16 Evidence of Public Celebrations and Feasting:
Politics and Agency in Late Eighteenth-Early
Nineteenth Century New York.............................................................. 265
Marie-Lorraine Pipes
17 Place and Memory on the City Streets:
The Revolutionary War Childhood of New York’s
Artisan-Mayor, Stephen Allen .............................................................. 285
Wendy E. Harris
Contents xvii

18 Public Life, Personal Grief: The Contrasting Existence

of a Nineteenth Century New York Family ......................................... 313
Elizabeth D. Meade and Rebecca L. White
19 Anthony Van Arsdale Winans: New York Merchant,
and His Daughter—The Canary of Lago Maggiore ............................ 327
Diane Dallal

Afterword........................................................................................................ 349
Lu Ann De Cunzo

Index ................................................................................................................ 363

Contributors

Sherene Baugher Department of Landscape Architecture; Archaeology Program,

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Mary C. Beaudry Department of Anthropology, Boston University, Boston,
MA, USA
Anne-Marie Cantwell Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, USA
Charles D. Cheek Cultural Resources Department, John Milner Associates, Inc.,
Alexandria, VA, USA
Diane Dallal AKRF, Inc., New York, NY, USA
Lu Ann De Cunzo Department of Anthropology, University of Delaware, Newark,
DE, USA
Joan H. Geismar LLC, New York, NY, USA
Wendy E. Harris Cragsmoor Consultants, Washington Grove, MD, USA
Jean Howson The RBA Group, Parsippany, NJ, USA
Meta F. Janowitz URS Corporation, Burlington, NJ, USA
School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Elizabeth D. Meade AKRF, Inc., New York, NY, USA
Kate Tarlow Morgan Center for Performing Arts & Letters, Lost & Found
Initiative (CUNY), Marlboro Elementary School, Marlboro, VT, USA
Marie-Lorraine Pipes State University of New York at Buffalo and
Marie-Lorraine Pipes, Zooarchaeologist Consultant, Victor, NY, USA

xix
xx Contributors

Nan A. Rothschild Barnard College, Columbia University, New York,

NY, USA
Richard G. Schaefer Historical Perspectives, Inc., Bayside, NY, USA
Richard F. Veit Department of History and Anthropology, Monmouth University,
West Long Branch, NJ, USA
Diana diZerega Wall Department of Anthropology, The City College of New York
CUNY, NY, USA
Rebecca L. White URS Corporation, Burlington, NJ, USA