Last week, workers excavating the future World Trade
Center site made an
astonishing discovery: the remains of an eighteenth-century wooden ship, presumably
buried as landfill two hundred years ago. If you aren’t already familiar with
the story, read the account from the New
York Times here.

Has this left you wondering what else might be found under the sidewalks of New York?  You might want to dip into Anne-Marie Cantwell
and Diana diZerega Wall’s Unearthing
Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City.
Weaving an absorbing, panoramic narrative, Cantwell and Wall explore the buried
remains of long-lost worlds: fashionable Washington Square and the notorious Five
Points; Dutch and English colonists, and the Africans they enslaved; the Native
Americans who occupied the land for eleven thousand years.

And if you are going to be in New
York City this summer, consider taking along a copy of
Wall and Cantwell’s Touring Gotham’s
Archaeological Past: 8 Self-Guided Walking Tours through New York City.
Through these walking tours, you’ll learn about ancient Native American trading
routes, sacred burial grounds, and seventeenth-century villages; and you’ll discover
sites that reveal details of the lives of colonial farmers and merchants,
enslaved Africans, Revolutionary War soldiers, and nineteenth-century hotel
keepers, grocers, and housewives.

Celebrating New York City’s
past and its present, these two books will intrigue anyone whose imagination
has been piqued by the unearthing of this mysterious ship.