Conference Agenda

University of Kentucky parking garages are popular persistent hangout spaces for faculty, staff, and students. Garages provide multi-use spaces for recreational activities, notably eating, smoking cigarettes and marijuana, drinking alcohol, having sex, taking selfies, sunbathing, skateboarding, napping, and car stunts. Campus garages are liminal spaces, existing between indoor/outdoor and public/private, important hangouts for recreation outside the surveillance of peers, administrators, and law enforcement. The Rose St. Garage Archaeological Survey Project (2022 - present) investigates one such notorious historical hangout space to probe the importance of liminal spaces to campus life. Material remains – notably vomit, urine, alcohol containers, cigarette butts, condoms, joint roaches, and blunt wrappers – mapped on the decks, stairwells, and garage perimeter suggest that recreators subvert panoptic control by finessing this liminality. Fieldwork, including oral testimony, suggests revelers utilize Rose St. in acts of celebration, shame, and defiance integral to daily life, recreation, and work at UKY.

Often called the Athens of the South, Nashville is the largest and most populous city in Tennessee and the thirteenth largest city by area in the United States. In recent years, Nashville has experienced waves of rapid development. As the city grows, more pressure is put on the city’s rich archaeological resources, but without enabling legislation, the ability to legally mandate archaeological assessment and preservation is limited. Preservation efforts have been more successful through a new public archaeology program focused on building awareness of this rich heritage and involving the public directly in local archaeology. This paper details the creation and growth of a public archaeology program in Nashville through several different platforms, from the development of tours and curriculum to public excavations and partnerships.

In 2022, TerraXplorations, Inc. excavated Van McMurray Playground (16OR752) in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans in preparation for the construction of a new drainage system to combat climate change-related flooding events. The assemblage of over 1,000 artifacts collected had a time depth from the Antebellum period through the 1960s. Intact features, including a cistern and privy, corresponded to the neighborhood’s urban expansion from a plantation to a New Orleans suburb and, finally, an incorporated neighborhood in a world city. Over time, demographics shifted from predominantly European immigrants to a majority of African Americans, with multiple land-use changes evident in historical records, including urban renewal projects in the 1960s. This investigation provided data about the history of urbanization in New Orleans and the African Americans who shaped Central City.

Nineteenth century Christchurch, like other British colonial settlements, was primarily supplied with goods by the global trade networks of the British empire. The city’s material culture – and nineteenth century archaeology – shares characteristics with other British colonial settlements throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and across the wider global landscape of British imperialism and colonialism. Yet, this material culture was filtered into Christchurch through a framework of supply and distribution influenced and shaped by local agents and adapted to the particular economic and cultural circumstances of the city’s foundation and development. This paper presents results from PhD research into the material culture of Christchurch through macro-scale assemblage analysis and a ‘city as site’ approach that analyses local and global patterns in the supply and distribution of domestic commodities to the city during the nineteenth century.