The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland

Description

This exciting collection on a new movement in urban archaeology investigates the historical archaeology of urban slums. The material that is dug up - broken dinner plates, glass grog bottles, and innumerable tonnes of building debris, nails and plaster samples - will not quickly find its way into museum collections. But, properly interpreted, it yields evidence of lives and communities that have left little in the way of written records. Including eleven case studies, five on cities in the United States and one each on London and Sheffield, and futher chapters on Cape Town, Sydney, Melbourne and Quebec City, it maps out a new field, which will attract the attention of a range of students and scholars outside archaeology, in particular historical sociologists and historians.

Alan Mayne is Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Melbourne. His publications include Fever, Squalor and Vice (1982), Represent the Slum (1991), The Imagined Slum (1993), and The Reluctant Italians (1997). Tim Murray is Professor of Archaeology and Head of the School of Hisotircal and Archaeological Studies at La Trobe University. He has written, with Judy Birmingham, Historical Archaeology of Australia - A Handbook, and edited The Archaeology of Aboriginal Australia (1998), Time and Archaeology (1999), The Great Archaeologists 2 vols (1999), and (with Atholl Anderson) Australian Archaeologist (2000).

"This is an important and timely volume." American Journal of Archaeology