Archeologists Search for Hints of the Past Under New York’s Concrete

In this ever-changing city, the sight of digging workers usually heralds the coming of a new apartment or office tower.

A few of those poking beneath soil and concrete, however, are not building skyscrapers of the future but seeking stronger connections with the city’s past.

From the farthest reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx to the city’s green heart in Central Park, urban archeologists are hunting for centuries-old dishware, toys, chamber pots and even the remains of garbage dumps--any bits of history that will add color and detail to New Yorkers’ understanding of the lives of those who came before.

“New York is . . . always concerned with the present and looking to the future,” says Diana Wall, a City College anthropologist who’s taken part in excavations all over the city. Archeology “provides an historical depth to this place.”

Archeologists say their urban work often provides valuable details about the everyday existence of those who didn’t make it into the history books, especially minorities, women, workers and the poor.

In 1991, excavation for a federal office building in lower Manhattan uncovered a cemetery from the 1700s where as many as 20,000 people, mostly slaves and free blacks, are believed interred.

Even before digging began, archeologists suspected the existence of the African Burial Ground, but they were startled by its scale. Historians believe blacks were buried there after nearby Trinity Church said they could no longer be buried on its land.

Under pressure from protesters, the federal government altered its building plans to preserve some of the graveyard and create a memorial, which has since been declared a national historic landmark.

Slightly to the south, in the financial district, workers excavating for an office tower in the 1980s unearthed the remains of a ship from the mid-1700s. It had been scuttled at the end of that century and used as part of a temporary dam before becoming landfill.

And this summer, nine interns supervised by researchers from City College, Barnard College and the New-York Historical Society searched Central Park for clues about Seneca Village, a settlement of free blacks and Irish immigrants. They were forced out of the village in 1857 to make way for the park.

Working between 82nd and 89th streets on the park’s west side, the students probed with ground-penetrating radar and instruments that use electrical conductivity and resistivity to find objects underground. They were looking for sites that might yield the remains of basements, wells and garbage dumps and thus be worth the disruption to the park that excavating would cause.

The interns’ findings are being loaded into computers for analysis by project leaders. Nan Rothschild, a Barnard anthropology professor and one of several researchers involved in the study, says it’s not yet clear what the team has found.

The team hopes buried artifacts will fill gaps in knowledge about Seneca Village, whose residents were long seen as vagabonds and squatters. That view, she says, was useful to those who evicted them but has been discredited by scholars in the last decade.

Rothschild says researchers examining tax, church and census records have shown this was a stable community of several hundred people, families who owned land and held jobs. The Seneca Village sketched by the old documents boasted several churches and a school, as well as small shops like a grocery and a barrel-maker, Rothschild says.

“African Americans did own property,” says Ericka Haskins, 27, a junior at Manhattan Community College who worked on the project. Seneca Village residents, she says, “weren’t just vagrants.”

Digging is also helping to shed light on New York’s remarkable transformation from a collection of rural enclaves to one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

One project unearthing some of that history is taking place in southeast Brooklyn on land associated with one Dutch family for more than 250 years.

The Lott family came to New York when it was still New Amsterdam and in 1719 bought 250 acres in what is now the Marine Park-Flatlands area. Over the years, the wealthy family sold it off piece by piece but kept the farm operating until about 1925. A descendant occupied the main house until 1989.

The area was largely farmland until the late 1920s, when city sewer and water systems arrived and made dense residential development possible.

Christopher Ricciardi, a Syracuse University archeology graduate student, worked on the painstaking Lott dig, sponsored by Brooklyn College.

For every three weeks of fieldwork--peeling back layers of soil with small trowels and brushes in search of glass or clay bits--they can spend as long as nine months on laboratory analysis.

“It’s like doing the ultimate jigsaw puzzle,” Ricciardi says.