Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Material Cultures of Urban Poverty and Daily Life
Chair: Sarah Rees Jones (University of York)
This session is designed to provide a comparative approach to the historical archaeology of poor neighbourhoods in large cities over the longue durée. The combination of historical documents and archaeological artefacts in telling stories about urban poverty and domestic life requires careful evaluation of traditional historical and archaeological approaches and raises questions about how best they might be combined. Significant advances in the historical archaeology of modern cities in Britain and the English-speaking world, once a neglected subject of archaeological research, are producing new approaches to the study of daily life and popular culture and new insight into the social complexity of large and growing cities and the portability of cultures between cities across the globe through migration. The achievements in this new field of modern historical archaeology now pose new questions and possibilities for historians working in the pre-modern period, enabling them to place their work in much broader comparative historical perspectives. New excavations in York have revealed the material remains of the nineteenth-century ‘slums’ about which Seebohm Rowntree wrote his influential studies of Poverty. These are the first excavations in York to focus on the modern era, in a city which is more famous for its medieval heritage and the wealth of archaeological assemblages and documentary sources for the pre-modern period. Rather unusually they permit the study of the development of the material conditions of domestic life over the longue durée, examining the impact and nature of industrial-era high density ‘slums’ within a relatively small city of ancient settlement. The three papers in this session, by comparing recent and current work in the cities of York, London, Melbourne and Sydney, will together address the question of how a study of the material culture of low status neighbourhoods can change traditional narratives of social history.
Abstracts
Contrasts and connections: small houses in late medieval and modern York
Jayne Rimmer (York Archaeological Trust)
A recent discussion on rows of medieval timber-framed small houses has suggested that they should be seen as the ‘forerunner’ of the brick-built English terrace (Quiney 2003). While it is true that rows and terraces of small houses of the late medieval and modern period share a number of fundamental design characteristics, such as the fact that they both consist of multiple numbers of houses sharing party walls under continuous roofs, there are other characteristics – not least the differences in construction materials – that stand them apart. This paper will consider the differences in individual houses both within and between medieval rows and modern terraces, in order to provide a clearer and more detailed understanding of their development across the longue durée.
Three aspects of the material culture of late medieval and modern small houses will be considered in detail: their fabric and method of construction, their form and layout, and their facilities and fittings. It will focus in particular on details such as their relative sizes and internal subdivisions, the position of chimneys, staircases, doors and windows, and provisions for outside space and sanitation. Evidence will be drawn from a substantial data-set of archaeological and documentary information gathered for my PhD on fourteenth and fifteenth-century small houses in York and Norwich (Centre for Medieval Studies, The University of York, 2007), and the ongoing excavation of a neighbourhood of nineteenth-century cottages in the Hungate area of York (York Archaeological Trust).
This approach will improve our understanding of the changing physical characteristics and spatial arrangements in small houses, while providing an insight into how a large majority of the urban population lived their lives across the late medieval and modern periods.
Living in Victorian
London’s East End: towards a material history of everyday life in mid
nineteenth-century Limehouse
Alastair Owens and Karen Wehner (Queen Mary, University of London)
Over the course of the nineteenth century, London’s East End became synonymous with poverty. Artists, writers, journalists and social investigators variously depicted it as a place of vice and squalor, a dangerous and ‘unknown land’, or a ‘dark continent’ within the heart of the imperial metropolis. In recent years, cultural and literary historians have done much to unravel the poetics of such representations and the politics of identity that lay behind them: we now understand that many such accounts of the city were the product of a bourgeois imagination which sought to project the racialised fears and anxieties of the middle classes onto the poor of the East End. Yet the mythologies that have developed in relation to Victorian London’s East End have proved to be enduring and seductive, not only within popular historical memory, but also amongst scholarly writing about the city. In attempting to move beyond the ‘burden of representation’ the London’s East End carries, this paper explores alternative evidence that might be used by historians to better understand the historical actualities of everyday life in a poor part of the city. It draws upon the findings of a recently completed AHRC-funded study, which employed an ‘ethnography of place’ approach, integrating archaeological and documentary evidence, to examine the material history of domestic life in the Victorian metropolis. We focus on one of the study sites that lay within the East End, examining the artefacts and objects once owned by a number of families that lived within a group of households on Regent Street in Limehouse. Through a close-focused and ‘intimate’ reading of these people and their possessions, the paper explores how the incorporation of such material evidence can yield new insights into the lived experiences and social complexities of Victorian Londoners’ lives.
Explorations in the archaeology of the modern city: Sydney and Melbourne compared
Tim Murray (LaTrobe University)
Contemporary historical archaeology is much concerned with understanding capitalism, colonialism and modernity. Analyses of material culture recovered from archaeological contexts have tended to focus on what material things have to tell us about class, ethnicity and race, gender, and the consequences of colonialism. While there has been a strong tradition of exploring the archaeology of rural settlements, it has long been understood that the city provides the crucial context for investigating the archaeology of capitalism and modernity. But urban archaeological assemblages (especially those created over the last 250 years) tend to be very large and complex, requiring considerable time and knowledge to allow material culture to be transformed into primary historical and anthropological data, which can then support analysis and interpretation. It is also now more widely understood that approaching the archaeology of the modern world requires a framework of methods and theories that will successfully integrate material evidence drawn from sites around the world, with dense local historical documentation. The sheer amount of evidence is a major challenge to historical archaeologists, but then so is the creation of viable strategies for integrating the various types of evidence we routinely deal with (e.g. oral history, photographs, written documents, plant and animal remains and material culture).
Research undertaken in Melbourne and Sydney over the last 12 years has begun to articulate the rigorous analysis of urban assemblages and related historical documentation to underpin broader inquiries into the historical archaeology of the modern world. Analysis typically occurs at several levels, ranging from a single sealed deposit to comparisons between contexts at the local, national and global levels. In this paper I will discuss those developments and focus on two broad ‘transnational’ matters. First, the consumption of consumer goods, and exploring what this can tell us about production, trade, ethnicity, class and gender. Second, the nature of the modern city as a global phenomenon, particularly as an outcome of the global mobility of people, capital and technology during the last 50 years of the nineteenth century.
The core of the research reported here is the analysis of large assemblages of domestic material culture found in archaeological contexts. These analyses are then linked with detailed documentary research into particular places (generally houselots), to provide place-specific histories. When the documentary evidence is available, these histories contain significant information about the occupants (countries of origin, employment, patterns of residence and mobility, and relationships with others) that foster inquiries into matters as diverse as migration, identity and the formation of communities. The analysis of large scale assemblages has also become more consistent and more rigorous. The creation of systems and databases that allow the consistent recording of data has made it possible for data drawn from different places (such as Sydney and Melbourne and latterly London) to be meaningfully compared, as well for the effective integration of historical and archaeological information. Fundamental to this approach is the description and analysis of patterns, be they of the contents of cesspits, or the occupancy of houses. For these patterns to be statistically meaningful, assemblage-based analysis has to be large scale, and is best supported by numerous comparable datasets.
