Urban archaeology

Urban archaeology can be applied to the study of social, racial, and economic dynamics and history within contemporary and antiquated cities as well as the environmental impacts within these spaces.

[1] Up until the nineteenth century when organized rubbish disposal became widespread in urban areas people invariably threw their waste from their windows or buried it in their gardens.

If their houses fell down, a common enough occurrence when planning laws were non-existent, owners would pick out what they could reuse, stamp down the remains and rebuild on the old site.

Archaeological excavation within historic cities therefore often produces a thick stratigraphy dating back to the original foundation and telling the story of its history.

It was only by excavation of the urban areas that these revelations could be made, as the city has long since outgrown its borders after its rebuild, some years after the Boudican revolt.

Issues such as this had appeared before, at Pompeii or at multi-phase rural sites but the move towards the investigation of cities, which began in Europe following the Second World War.

The trend of urban excavation in areas such as Europe, the East Coast of the United States, and other western world cities, has grown since the war.

This method was started by Ed Harris and Patrick Ottaway in 1976 before being expanded upon by the Museum of London in the mid 1980s and transferred to the York Archaeological Trust.

By identifying which features cut others and using information from dateable artefacts and ecofacts an archaeologist can isolate various phases of activity and show how the use of the site developed of periods of hundreds or even thousands of years.