CUNY Academic Commons

Matthew Brunwasser’s Digging the Age of Aquarius discusses the future of archaeology when researching and observing contemporary objects that could be considered artifacts in the future, but are considered as trash by today’s standards. Severin Fowles and Kaet Heupel’s The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World discu…[Read more]

The Union Order of Tents is an organization run by African American women that were active during the underground railroad. Their focus is to preserve their mission of protecting African American women, and protecting the resources of their mission. Many of the members working in the NYC district are elderly however, and are having difficulty…[Read more]

Ursula K. Frederick’s Revolution is the New Black: Graffiti/Art and Mark-making Practices discusses the resurgence of graffiti in contemporary Australian cities, and archaeologically observes its influence and impact it has, especially in relation to Australian rock art. Harold Mytum and Gilly Carr Prisoners of War discusses archeological i…[Read more]

Jessica Leigh Hester’s Exploring a Hidden Archive of New York City’s Historic Trash discusses the various types of items that were found in the garbage that now preserved at the Tenement Museum. William Rathje’s Integrated Archaeology: A Garbage Paradigm discusses the archaeological context on the trash in which what they can tell us about human…[Read more]

Margaret Bagwell’s After the Storm, Destruction and Reconstruction: The Potential for an Archaeology of Hurricane Katrina discusses archaeologists studied how the contemporary landscape of the U.S. Gulf Coast was affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and how it could be avoided in the future. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s The Taphonomy of Disaster and the…[Read more]

Pamela L. Geller’s Bodyscapes, Biology, and Heteronormativity discusses how society views the attraction of the human body. Gayle Rubin’s Sites, Settlements, and Urban Sex: Archaeology and the Study of Gay Leathermen in San Francisco,1955–1995 discusses the different views of masculinity due to homosexual culture. Barbara L. Voss’s The Scale o…[Read more]

I was at first uncertain about my travel to the Stonewall Inn, due to my ignorance of the place, and how important the place is to the LGBTQ community. When I reached inside the Inn in the evening, the first floor was packed with many people. Several people were mingling with one another, dinking different sets of alcohol, with two guys playing…[Read more]

Diana Di Zerega Wall’s Sacred Dinners and Secular Teas: Constructing Domesticity in Mid-19th-Century New York discusses the economic and consumer differences between upper and lower-class women in mid-19th century Greenwich Yillage. Bryn Williams’s Chinese Masculinities and Material Culture discusses how the behavior and activities of Chinese men…[Read more]

Jan Gejl and Svarre Birgitte’s excerpt of How to Study Public Life discusses tips of properly observing individuals in public spaces in descriptive methods like counting, mapping, tracking, and other methods. Neil Silberman and Margaret Purser’s Collective Memory as Affirmation: People-Centered Public Heritage in a Digital Age discusses the imp…[Read more]

Meredith B. Linn’s Elixir of Emigration: Soda Water and the Making of Irish Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City discusses the Irish immigrants and their relationship with soda water due to their traditional understandings of water. Paul R. Mullins and Lewis C. Jones’ Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Eng…[Read more]

Jaskrian Dhillon’s lecture on indigenous politics and environmental justice brought up the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,772-mile-long pipeline that would transfer crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The controversy surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline is that the pipeline would negatively i…[Read more]

Michael R. Allen’s Bending the Future discusses the event in Ferguson and how the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) could do better to preserve the history of the incident like Ferguson. Kathryn M. Kuranda’s chapter in A Companion to Cultural Resource Management discusses the cultural resource management and their procedure in studying the…[Read more]

Robert B. Kent and Augusto F Gandia-Ojeda’s article The Puerto Rican Yard-Complex of Lorain, Ohio discusses how Puerto Ricans are able to express their cultural identity in a majorly white populated city in Ohio, like placing flags displaying their nation. Kathleen A. O’Donnell’s Good Girls Gone Bad: The Consumption of Fetish Fashion and the Sexua…[Read more]

In the three documents by Alfredo González‐Ruibal, Rodney Harrison, and Monica L. Smith, they discuss the complicated history of archaeology and the methods they have plowed in the past. The purpose of archaeology is to preserve and understand the remnants of the past. Ruibal’s article Time to Destroy an Archaeology of Supermodernity disc…[Read more]

Both Craig N. Cipolla’s Native American Historical Archaeology and the Trope of Authenticity and Paul R. Mullins Race and Prosaic Materiality: the Archaeology of Contemporary Urban Space and the Invisible Colour Line focuses the poor treatment of both Native Americans and African Americans through racial segregation and cultural trespassing. B…[Read more]