Customer Reviews

Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City

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Imaginative and graceful writing, based on a firm foundation of archaeological and historical evidence, make this book enormously appealing. Underlying the authors' speculations and conclusions is a vast amount of ecological and artifactual evidence, prehistoric and historic. Cantwell and Wall discuss the ways people have built their dwellings, made their livings, coped with adversity, celebrated successes, and performed various rituals in and around New York's changing ecological and social environment for the past 11,000 years.

"Unearthing Gotham" is enhanced by a beautifully selected set of illustrations ranging from early stone points found in Staten Island through archaeological site maps, drawings of New Amsterdam from the 1620's, a lithograph view of Five Points around 1827 to the Van Cortlandt Mansion in the 1990's.

In view of the recent Trade Center catastrophe, this book is particularly reassuring. Given the continuing efforts of preservationists, New York's long history in all its diversity will not only be preserved for the future, but that history will continue to be made. I strongly recommend "Unearthing Gotham" to anyone interested in archaeology, history, the long life of a great city, and New York itself.

This is the very best book one could have if he is interested in the early history of New York City and the area immediately surrounding it. The coverage of Native Americans is especially strong, fascinating from beginning to end. The authors know their subject thoroughly, write beautifully, and have given us an exciting, scholarly work that will be a classic for some time to come.

New York, like no other city in the world, is a city of spectacular heights and many books have been written about the buildings that rise to the skies. How many people, however, think about what lies beneath the vast weight of edifices and human life that exists above the ground? In this compelling and instructive book, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall have a given us a lesson not only about the artifacts and remains that have lain dormant for centuries but also in the history that surrounds their burial and ultimate exposure.

In a time-line fashion (11,000 years before present to today) the authors reconstruct a picture of what life might have been like during these times. Lest one think the unearthings are limited to Manhattan, they are not. All five boroughs are represented. There were moments during the reading of this book that I wanted the authors to spend more time recounting the actual excavations to which they refer, but in the end their historical perspective is the link that saves the day. Without it, their offerings would be no more than a field trip.

My future trips around the city will be made with a new awareness as I ask myself, "I wonder what lies beneath....". It is a question we all can ask.

"Unearthing Gotham" is the story of historical archaeology in the city of New York. Historical archaelogy is the archaeological study of eras that might also have written documentation - so what can digging around in old privies tell us that the paper trail does not?

Cantwell and Wall prove the answer is "an almost infinite amount." From a painstaking analysis of shards of pottery found in various privies, for example, we learn how the world changes for women when New York became too big to walk (they no longer lived above the shop, so to speak). In landfill in lower Manhattan, the charred ghost of a ship that sunk in the harbor in the 17th-century tells us something about trade back then. Most touchingly, the discovery and excavation of the old African Burial Grounds tells us something about the lives of the enslaved (did you know that over 20% of the residents of colonial Manhattan were enslaved? I didn't; I learned it from this book).

The book is extremely well-designed, liberally illustrated with photos of digs, but also old maps and engravings. If you have lived or walked New York, it will inspire you to look at the city in a new way - the ground you tred on still bears the marks of centuries past.

By the way, the authors have also brought out a book of walking tours based on their discoveries - next time I'm in town I'm tucking it under my arm and having a good look around at the vestiges of the 17th-19th centuries presented here.

As a long-time student of and writer about old New York, this book held so many surprises for me that I felt like a college freshman again. For so many years I had read about the Native Americans who occupied this city, but the illustrations, maps and photos that accompany this complex narrative give it new, more vivid life for me. The experiences of the Dutch, African-Americans and British that followed are given a face, so to speak, by the detailed, but lively, narration. The graphics, especially of the extreme southern tip of Manhattan, are generous, clear, and highly educational for newcomers to and veterans of this history. (By the way, as a Brooklynite, I want to kiss the authors for covering all five boroughs, and not just focusing on Manhattan, as do most histories of NYC.) This is a book that can be enjoyed on so many levels. It is a great introduction to a relatively--and undeservedly--obscure subject.

This book was good but I must admit it was extremely repetitive and very over written. Facts that could've taken 1 sentence to reveal took pages. More like a long essay then a book. But still very good.

The first and most important thing to know about this book is that it was produced by a university press--a high-end, well known university press and, in this case, one whose editors, book designers, and advertising copywriters were better at their jobs than were the authors, but a university press nonetheless. That fact wafts off every page. Indeed, it's interesting to speculate about who the writers and publisher imagined the audience for this book to be. Unearthing Gotham isn't scholarly enough to appeal to professional archeologists and historians, and it's entirely too dull to be a popular trade book (though, to judge from the way the product is externally presented and packaged, that is exactly what Yale Press had in mind). In fact, Cantwell and Dizerega-Wall seem to be doing their intentional best to make sure none of the information they present ever comes to life: rather, it unfolds in the dry, detached, dispassionate tones of a first-year college lecturer. In what is blatantly an attempt to satisfy some sort of political agenda, the first third of the book is given over to a discussion of the Native Peoples who lived for millennia in the area that is now the 5 boroughs of New York. The trouble is, the physical evidence of thousands of years of native presence and culture could apparently now be contained in an average-sized garage; in other words, it has almost all been destroyed, built-over, lost. That's a shame, but it's not a good reason to make us read a hundred pages in which the authors have substantially this to say: "we don't actually know about New York, but over there they did this, and other Native Peoples did that, and we can conjecture that maybe they were like this." In a word, it's a bore. Okay, one thinks, when we get closer to the present, the archeological evidence will be more complete and the history will get more interesting. And yet, no. To be sure, there are more sites, more finds, more evidence, but the lives behind the relics remain as remote and shadowy as ever; the authors simply don't know how to put flesh on those bones. Cantwell and Dizerega-Wall present graphs dedicated to such things as the percentage of clay pipe fragments relative to ceramic fragments in privy sites. They make much of analyses of the kinds of dishes used by people in various geographical areas and of various classes and ethnicities, assuring us that such data tell us a great deal about social distinctions and about the tenor every day life. They do? Such as? That lots of pipe fragments suggests that a pub instead of a house stood on the site? That people over there liked to serve tea to their guests, while those other people tended to invite people for dinner? That's the kind of fascinating insight for which the reader is expected to plow through 300 pages of densely written prose? Other than providing the material for PhD dissertations that one heartily suspects were never read by anyone who didn't have to read them, most of what is presented in Unearthing Gotham is similarly unhinged from deeper meaning or analysis and it simply isn't possible for the non-archeologist to develop the slightest enthusiasm for it. The many tiny, murky photographs or the maps reproduced on such a small scale that they can't be read don't help (and that's one blazing indication of a university press's legendary parsimony). The truly great "popularizers of science" (of which there are more than a few) know how to bring even technical information to life for a mass audience; sadly for the reader, and unfortunately for such a potentially engaging topic, Cantwell and Dizerega-Wall never even come close.