Livestream: Unearthing NYC’s blueprint from an architectural perspective

It’s truths like these and more that come to the fore when urban archaeologist Alyssa Loorya sets off on her Ted Talk. In this illuminating discourse, she talks about how urban archaeology can be a wonderful tool to understand racial and economic bifurcations drawn along historical lines in the blueprint of any city. Her case in point happens to be New York, a city that could stake its claim at cosmopolitan culture way before any other metropolis could.

She begins by saying, “As New Yorkers, we’re often busy looking up at the development going on around us. We rarely stop to consider what lies beneath the city streets. And it’s really hard to imagine that this small island village would one day become a forest of skyscrapers. Yet, as an urban archaeologist, that’s exactly what I do. I consider landscapes, artefacts to tell the stories of the people who walked these streets before us. Because history is so much more than facts and figures.”

She gives us an example of a wooden well ring which was the base for the construction of a water well. She says it provided her an opportunity to take a sample of the wood for tree-ring dating, and get a date to confirm the fact that they had indeed found a series of 18th-century structures beneath Fulton Street.

Loorya tells her audiences about this bottle which contained water imported from Germany and dates to 1790. She says, “We know New Yorkers always had to go to great lengths to get fresh drinking water. Small island, you really couldn’t drink the well water, it was to brackish. But the notion that New Yorkers were importing bottled water from Europe, more then two hundred years ago, is truly a testament to the fact that New York City is a cosmopolitan city, always has been, where you could get practically anything from anywhere.”

According to Loorya, archaeology affords us an opportunity to incorporate the knowledge of our past into our present-day dialogues, into the dialogues about our futures, incorporate the information into our shared spaces.