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Moving on from holes and corners: recent currents in urban archaeology*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
Extract
Urban archaeology offers distinctive readings of urban histories: we have too few of those to ignore fresh insights. Half a dozen recent books offer a sample from a fertile field. The pressures of modern urban development, with the fundamental incompatibility of today's foundations with the ‘soft fill’ of archaeological deposits, have obliged urban archaeology to be a public discipline. Urban archaeology has stayed in the limelight, not only through sympathetic coverage on television and radio over continuing crises, like the recent unpredicted discoveries at the Rose Playhouse site, but also through popular books — like Richard Hall's glossy paperback on York's Coppergate excavations. Much of this material, however, does more than demonstrate how far passion can make urban excavations into journalistic copy. Methodologies, research priorities and interpretations are all subject to argument. Urban archaeology offers an approach to the urban past, but it is also an urban phenomenon in its own right.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990
Footnotes
*
See notes section, p. 10, for details of publications to which this article refers.
References
Notes
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