Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City
by Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall
Yale University Press

At the end of the last ice age, the area that became the New York region was not the archipelago it is now. It was highlands, grazed by now-extinct animals, cut through by the streams that would someday become the Hudson and East Rivers, which flowed though the then-steep cataracts of the Verazzano Narrows to a vast coastal plain and on to the Atlantic Ocean, some 75 miles out.

At the time, 11,000 years ago, New York was at best thinly populated; more than likely it was one of many popular hunting areas along the East Coast, frequented by tribes of a little-understood, proto-Native American civilization called the Clovis. Not surprisingly, the majority of artifacts fall under the arrowheads-and-tool-shards category, and it is difficult to piece together anything resembling a lifelike image of those earliest New Yorkers.

But this is exactly what "Unearthing Gotham," Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall's fascinating study of New York City archaeology, sets out to do. Part history of New York, part archaeological report, part history of urban archaeology as a profession, "Unearthing Gotham" is full of richly imagined landscapes and life narratives; Cantwell and Wall are like the police sketch artist who can take a description like "a double chin and a receding hairline" and draw the perp to a tee.

"Unearthing Gotham" is immense in its scope, ranging from the earliest settlers to the rise of the modern urban middle class in the mid-1800s, with explorations into the lives of freed slaves and the first Dutch traders to settle the tip of Manhattan. The book takes on what is by now a tired whipping boy — the mythology of Europe's discovery of the "New World" — with an originality and scholarly precision that should move even the most conservative critic to excuse Cantwell and Wall's occasional slip into PC banter. But the authors are hardly without qualifications to back up their apple-cart upsettings — they are both anthropologists, Cantwell at Rutgers and Wall at the City College of New York, and both were leading figures in the growth of New York archaeology as a field of study during the 1970s and '80s.

For the authors, the central myth about the New York area, and one that was propagated by generations of historians and archaeologists, held that the New York region was largely unpopulated during the few hundred years before European settlement. As a result, the region was virgin territory, and the Europeans were its first settlers. But by examining artifacts from digs in Staten Island, the Bronx and even the edges of JFK International Airport, Cantwell and Wall present a different picture, one where the New York region was settled, on and off, for thousands of years before Manhattan was even a twinkle Henry Hudson's eye. They argue, for example, that the increasingly delicate and ornate shards found at later-stage sites in the Bronx and Long Island are evidence of a more sedentary culture. Such is their interpretive skills that a piece of pottery formed in just such a way becomes the key to overturning decades of received knowledge.

But on top of being an introduction to urban archaeology, "Unearthing Gotham" is also a political tract, inasmuch as archaeology fits into New York's cultural politics (but then what doesn't?). A major threat to New York archaeology is the constant upheaval of land by new construction, especially in Manhattan. In the 1980s, to ensure archeologists an opportunity to examine sites before they are built on, the city required that large projects undergo a City Environmental Quality Review; if a potential site is found, the developers have to pay for a dig. But there are many loopholes in the process; the authors note that in 1991 only 3 percent of all new construction even underwent a CEQR.

The book, in that vein, is a plea, written to inspire popular interest in the city's past and the physical evidence that remains. Cantwell and Wall include myriad examples of lay archaeologists playing important roles in the early days of New York archaeology, and it's probably no coincidence that the book is written to appeal to those amateur diggers' spiritual descendants. It would be a fitting reward for "Unearthing Gotham" if, in the next few years, a groundswell of interest in the city's past emerges; if, after reading books like this one, the public begins to clamor for an active public effort to locate and preserve evidence of the city's storied past.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)