The Contested Commons

Abstract

The Commons, the area surrounding and including the present-day location of City Hall in lower Manhattan, has been an intensely contested landscape since the seventeenth century. The non-elite inhabitants of New Amsterdam, and later New York City, claimed this unappropriated land as a Commons in the traditional medieval sense, as an area where subsistence activities such as cattle grazing and firewood collection could be conducted (Thompson 1993). By the end of the seventeenth century, a portion of the Commons was being utilized as an African burial ground and ritual space. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the colonial government was attempting (with limited success) to restrict and regulate activities on the Commons, including burials. Reactions to recent excavations within the African Burial Ground and subsequent controversies regarding the project research design demonstrate that the contestation continues unabated. This project provides an ideal opportunity to address several aspects of the archaeology of capitalism, including the social construction of racial categories, the formulation of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic historical consciousness, the essentialist/social constructionist debate, and the role of descendent communities and their allies in archaeological, historical, and bioanthropological research (for general background on the project see Cook 1993; Coughlin 1994; Dunlap 1993; Harrigton 1993; Harris et al. 1993; Howard University and John Milner Associates 1993; Jorde 1993, and Howson and Harris 1992).