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Archaeology in New York City

Welcome to ARCHAEOLOGY's New York City gateway! The magazine is a longtime resident of NYC. In fact, it was first edited by NYU classics professor Jotham Johnson, working from his office on Washington Square, some 60 years ago. Since then, ARCHAEOLOGY has operated out of "digs" at 50 Park Place, 15 Park Row, and 135 William Street (all Downtown), before moving to our current location opposite Midtown in Long Island City, Queens, in the summer of 2001.

Archaeology is always going on in NYC--be it excavations, museum exhibitions, or lectures or other public programs. Here we'll bring you features and news from ARCHAEOLOGY and the ARCHAEOLOGY website, the latest about discoveries and excavations, interviews with the people who make archaeology happen in NYC, information about upcoming events, and links to other organizations, universities, and museums involved in studying our city's past.

FROM ARCHAEOLOGY

The City Hall Park Project
Excavations in the late 1990s revealed evidence from New York's formative years.

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Before the Big Apple
A walking tour of Lower Manhattan's colonial beginnings

Headstones for Dummies, the New York Edition
Exploring Manhattan's colonial cemeteries

Early American Gravestones
Archaeological Perspectives on Three Cemeteries of Old New York

Taking Care of Business
The Landmarks Preservation Commission and Archaeology in New York City

The African Burial Ground
Our coverage, from the discovery and controversy to the reburial and designation of the African Burial Ground a National Monument.

Interactive Dig: Brooklyn's eighteenth-century Lott House (1999-2001)
Uncover the buried past of a Dutch family living on the fringes of the burgeoning city that would become New York.

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FEATURED EXHIBITION

Minoans in Manhattan
A new exhibition offers a rare opportunity to appreciate the achievements of Crete's Bronze Age civilization.

LINKS

Archaeological Institute of America
The Institute has societies in New York and Staten Island, as well as Long Island, Westchester, and northern New Jersey.

Landmarks Preservation Commission
The LPC Archaeology Department reviews subsurface work subject to environmental review regulations and, for some sites, the Landmarks Law. If important archaeological resources are threatened, the department determines and oversees mitigation. (See "Taking Care of Business.")

PANYC
Founded in 1980, The Professional Archaeologists of New York City, Inc. (PANYC) is a not-for-profit watchdog organization devoted to the protection and preservation of New York City's archaeological sites.

Brooklyn College Archaeological Research Center
Brooklyn College has excavated throughout New York City, including the Lott House, the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House, the New Utrecht Church, and Fort Greene Park. BC-ARC has also been presently involved in the analysis of materials from excavations at City Hall Park.

Five Points
In the 1990s, archaeological excavation of the Foley Square courthouse block in Downtown NYC provided the opportunity to examine the physical remains of life in Five Points, a neighborhood known as a center of vice and debauchery throughout the nineteenth century.

African Burial Ground
In the early 1990s, the remains of more than 400 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Africans were discovered and excavated during work for a federal building in Downtown New York. The site was designated a National Monument in February 2006. See both the main Burial Ground website and The African Burial Ground commemorative site presented by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in conjunction with the General Services Administration. ARCHAEOLOGY's coverage of the site can be found here.

The Seneca Village Project
Located in today's Central Park (between 82nd and 87th streets east of Central Park West), Seneca Village was settled in the 1820s, on the eve of emancipation in New York State, by African Americans. By the mid-1850s, it was a thriving community of African Americans and Irish, with a population of more than 250 people.

King Manor
Dating from the eighteenth century, King Manor was, from 1805 to 1827, the home of Rufus King, an author of the U.S. Constitution, one of New York's first United States Senators, ambassador to Great Britain, and an early opponent of slavery. A Hofstra University field school has excavated at the site, today the centerpiece of a NYC park in Jamaica, Queens.

Historic Weeksville
A nineteenth-century community located in the Ninth Ward of Brooklyn, Weeksville took its name from James Weeks, an African American who purchased land there in 1838. Its remaining houses were "rediscovered" in 1968.

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© 2007 by the Archaeological Institute of America
archive.archaeology.org/online/features/nyc/

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