CUNY Academic Commons

The three articles analyze the role which material things played in the history and social-cultural lives of communities in the industrialization era. According to Fowles and Heupel, the world is filled with an accumulation of material things as humans feel the absence of things they need and continue to invent more (2013). Concurrently, as…[Read more]

Blessing Tate
United Order of the Tents Reflection
Week 14

United Order of the Tents
After much research, one would assume that an organization that began with the underground railroad custom of providing “tents” for those that escaped enslavement would encounter preservation issues. Preservation of assets, customs, and their mission. As a m…[Read more]

Graffiti as with ceramics are an essential source of material evidence through which archaeologists can derive information and learn cultural ideas and identities of the past and compare them to the present. Blake (1981), Burton and Ferrel (2013), and Fredrick (2009) are in agreement that the relationship between techniques, content, and form of…[Read more]

My trip to the Stonewall Inn in New York was a revelation of the advances made in the fight against social injustice in this country. As a gay bar in Manhattan, its location marks the landmark uprising to the fighting for LGBTQ rights in the country. As I learned during the trip about the history of the structure, it was the first landmark…[Read more]

Garbage holds essential information about people, their behaviors, culture, and the communities that they live in. Indeed, much of the artifacts that the archaeologists collect, record and evaluate in compulsive detail is what people in the past threw away as valueless—broken ceramics, dulled or broken stone tools, food-making debris, rusted m…[Read more]

All the articles, Dawdy (2006), Garazhian and Yazdi (2008), and Bagwell (2009), make a case that, apart from the gradual process, urban settlements and cultures become archaeological frameworks through rapid abandonment, as reflected by natural disasters. The researchers investigate various ways in which natural disasters affect people and how…[Read more]

Gender in Urban Spaces
Wall (1991), uses ceramic material data to explore and understand the factors that the middle-class women living in Greenwich Village in New York City considered in making consumer decisions in the mid-19th century. The author utilizes the stylistic analysis method—focusing on decorative styles applied to the ceramic a…[Read more]

The authors contrast in the perspectives they take to analyze the sexuality of the past using archaeology. Rubin (2000), uses various archaeological data such as site definition, settlement patterns, catchment areas, and population estimates to understand urban gay men. Rubin conducted his research solely in San Francisco and discussed topics…[Read more]

The authors describe various methods for studying urban spaces and the complexity and nuances of human culture and interactivity. Gehl and Svarre (2013), discuss the more traditional ethnographic methodologies such as counting, mapping, tracing, tracking, looking for traces, photography, test walks, and keeping a diary. Weiss (1995), discusses…[Read more]

Leone (2005), Mullins and Jones (2011), and Linn (2010) have employed interdisciplinary approaches of engaged anthropology to illustrate the hidden forms of racial and ethnic inequality inscribed in the American society. Leone (2005), contemplates on what happens to the “othered” cultures within capitalism. He uses the ideas from Louis Alt…[Read more]

On October 3, 2019, I had the pleasure and great opportunity to listen to a lecture by Scholar and Political Organizer Jaskaran Dhillon. To note her position, Ms. Dhillon’s area of research, scholarship, and teachings include, indigenous studies, youth studies, anthropology, colonial violence, and political ecology. Her current work includes…[Read more]

The first article to be analyzed is by Thomas King, known as “A comparison to cultural resource management.” It begins with the analysis of cultural resource management. This is the consideration of the protection and management of the multitudes of scarce elements of cultural heritage in a modern world (King) with the expansion of populations and…[Read more]

For me, this read was a bit heavy in connotations. I had to do some research outside of the text to gather a better understanding of the ideologies that were presented. Hopefully, this is a suitable reflection of what both authors are attempting to postulate.

Leone offers a thorough understanding of historical archaeology and capitalist…[Read more]

Kent and Gandia-Ojeda’s study examines whether the Puerto Ricans living in the U.S, mainly, in Lorain, Ohio, express their identity and ethnicity with residential landscaping. The study found that Puerto Ricans utilize various semi-fixed visual symbols on their residences and have adopted a pattern of maintaining their homes and yards to i…[Read more]

According to González-Ruibal and Harrison, the contemporary world (supermodernity as referred to by González-Ruibal, is characterized by many barriers that have affected archaeology as a discipline. While adopting a symmetrical method, González-Ruibal, identifies four issues that concern the modern archaeology: materiality, mediation, place and me…[Read more]

Urban archaeology is one aspect that helps individuals to reflect on the past. It is right to suggest that historical archaeologists can challenge various colonial narratives. According to Cipolla, this action can be carried out in that these archaeologists can present the rich data they gathered. However, often time, this data is misappropriated…[Read more]