Books by Krysta Ryzewski
Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places, 2022
An archaeologically grounded history of six legendary places in Detroit.
The city of Detroit has... more An archaeologically grounded history of six legendary places in Detroit.
The city of Detroit has endured periods of unprecedented industrial growth,
decline, and revitalization between the late nineteenth century and the present.
In Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary
Places, Krysta Ryzewski presents six archaeological case studies of
legendary Detroit institutions—Little Harry speakeasy, the Ransom Gillis
house, the Blue Bird Inn, Gordon Park, the Grande Ballroom, and the Halleck
Street log cabin—that trace the contours of the city’s underrepresented
communities and their relationship to local currents of capitalism and
social justice. Through a combination of rigorous historical archaeological
research and narrative storytelling, Ryzewski deftly contextualizes the cases within the city’s current struggles, including recovery from bankruptcy, and future-oriented recovery e fforts.
Detroit Remains is is the first historical archaeology book focused on Detroit and one of the few to foreground the archaeology of the Great Migration era (ca. 1915–1970). The archaeological scholarship is rooted in collaborative, community-involved, and public-facing initiatives. The case studies examine how power is and has been exercised in Detroit’s communities over the past century: how it was stripped from the city’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century residents, but also how they acquired alternative sources of agency by establishing creative and illicit economies, most of which still operated within the city’s capitalist framework.
Throughout this book, connections run deep between archaeology, heritage, politics, historic preservation, and storytelling. Detroit Remains
demonstrates how the city’s past, present, and future lie not in ruins but
in the tangible archaeological traces of the everyday lives of Detroiters and
their legacies.
Published by University of Alabama Press
Montserrat is a small island in the Leeward islands of the eastern Caribbean and at present a Bri... more Montserrat is a small island in the Leeward islands of the eastern Caribbean and at present a British Overseas Territory. It has suffered greatly in recent times, first from the devastations of Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and since 1995 from the still-ongoing eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano that has caused two-thirds of the island's population to emigrate and left half the island a dangerous exclusion zone. Archaeological research here began only in the late 1970s, but work over the past four decades has now made it possible to present an archaeological history of Montserrat, from the earliest known traces of human activity on the island about 5,000 years ago to the present.
This book draws on all the available archaeological evidence (including that from the co-authors' own island-wide survey and excavation project since 2010), as well as newly available archival documents, to trace this little island's long history and heritage. This is not the story of an isolated and remote island: Montserrat is shown rather to be a place intricately connected to the flows of people and goods that have travelled between islands and across the Atlantic at various points in time, both Amerindian and historical. Despite its small size and seeming irrelevance, Montserrat has in fact always been networked into regional and global systems of connectivity. An underlying theme of this volume is resilience. It presents insights from the archaeological and documentary evidence on how the island's inhabitants have coped with often adverse conditions throughout the course of its history-hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, slavery, disease, invasions, and impoverishment-all while remaining proudly connected to heritage that celebrates the accomplishments of island residents.
Detroit / Great Lakes Region Publications by Krysta Ryzewski
The New City within Detroit: Archaeological Investigations of Old Hamtramck Center
Historical Archaeology, 2024
Hamtramck, a small, century-old city completely enveloped by Detroit, is promoted by its leadersh... more Hamtramck, a small, century-old city completely enveloped by Detroit, is promoted by its leadership as “the world in 2.1 square miles.” This slogan invokes two inextricable facets of the city’s heritage and contemporary identity: Hamtramck’s longstanding reputation as a proud, working-class city that has always been welcoming to immigrants, and its significance as the former home of automotive manufacturer Dodge Main, whose operations between 1910 and 1979 positioned the city as a global industrial powerhouse. The Old Hamtramck Center Project combines historical, archaeological, and geospatial sources of data to examine the process of urban expansion in the new city, which included the dissonant relationships among local communities and the built environment. Archaeological investigations within Old Hamtramck Center consider how the city’s residents experienced the often inconsistent circumstances of rapid urbanization and civic organization as the rural village transformed into a crowded industrial city during the early 20th century.
Historical Archaeology and the Evolution of Twentieth-Century Slums in Detroit
The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum, 2023
In comparison with New York City’s Five Points or Boston’s North and West End neighborhoods, Detr... more In comparison with New York City’s Five Points or Boston’s North and West End neighborhoods, Detroit’s slum districts were late arrivals. Owing to the luxury of lateral space and the relatively later date of its industrialization, Detroit did not begin to grapple with issues of widespread overcrowding, sanitation, and vice until the 1860s. In contrasting Detroit’s experience with those of cities like New York and Boston, and in questioning some of the conclusions about slums that historians have drawn from other cities, it is useful to apply a long-term, archaeological perspective to understanding the evolving media depictions and official treatments of three designated slum neighborhoods between 1880 and 1920: the Potomac Quarter, Tin Can Alley, and Corktown. Historical archaeological sources – primary archival records, excavated artifacts, and land-use data – are enlisted to examine the evolution, depiction, and manipulation of slum neighborhoods in Detroit with particular attention, first, to how city officials and the media deployed rhetoric about slums to achieve particular opportunistic agendas, and, second, to how residents in targeted neighborhoods lived in ways that, at times, departed from stereotypes of slum dwellers. These sources demonstrate how the definitions of slum neighborhoods in Detroit were malleable and regularly contorted to deploy planning or political strategies that targeted for removal places or communities that were deemed “undesirable” in the name of civic improvement.
Archaeologists and Community Collaboration
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2024
Collaborative archaeology is a practice of partnership, stewardship, and accountability involving... more Collaborative archaeology is a practice of partnership, stewardship, and accountability involving professional archaeologists and community stakeholders who share interests in a project’s objectives and outcomes. Community stakeholders may include familial descendants, local residents, civic officials, non-profit organizations, tribal representatives, government agencies, commercial developers, business owners, the media, students, professionals from other fields (e.g., historic preservationists, architects, environmental scientists), and any other individuals or groups who have a vested interest in the sites that archaeologists investigate and interpret. Collaborative partnerships between archaeologists and communities take many forms, from one-time consultations to long-term initiatives that involve stakeholders in all aspects of project design, data recovery, and outcomes. Over the past generation, collaborative archaeology projects have become increasingly oriented towards political action, ethical practice, restorative justice, community welfare, and engaging social issues that extend beyond the traditional disciplinary scope of archaeology. The sheer variety of community-involved archaeology projects and their culturally specific variations across the world are impossible to convey in a single summary. Therefore, this discussion focuses on the politically engaged and action-oriented perspectives of community archaeology projects and their processes, drawing primarily from North American examples.
Klein et al. 2018, The Future of American Archaeology: Engage the Voting Public of Kiss Your Research Goodbye!
Over the past several years, we have seen many attacks on publicly funded and mandated archaeolog... more Over the past several years, we have seen many attacks on publicly funded and mandated archaeology in the United States. These attacks occur at the state level, where governors and state legislatures try to defund or outright eliminate state archaeological programs and institutions. We have also seen several attacks at the federal level. Some members of Congress showcase archaeology as a waste of public tax dollars, and others propose legislation to move federally funded or permitted projects forward without consideration of impacts on archaeological resources. These attacks continue to occur, and we expect them to increase in the future. In the past, a vigilant network of historic preservation and archaeological organizations was able to thwart such attacks. The public, however, largely remains an untapped ally. As a discipline, we have not built a strong public support network. We have not demonstrated the value of archaeology to the public, beyond a scattering of educational and informational programs. In this article, we—a group of archaeologists whose work has focused on public engagement—provide a number of specific recommendations on how to build a strong public constituency for the preservation of our nation’s archaeological heritage.
The Michigan Archaeologist, 2020
Sixty years ago, during the spring of 1960, Dr. Arnold Pilling of Wayne State University conducte... more Sixty years ago, during the spring of 1960, Dr. Arnold Pilling of Wayne State University conducted the first professional historical archaeological excavation project in Detroit at the site of the future Michigan Consolidated Gas Company building (20WN262), located at corner of Woodward and Jefferson Avenues across from the Detroit Riverfront. There had been several previous salvage projects undertaken in the Detroit area by relic hunters and historians in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, but Pilling’s systematic excavation of historic period remains from the Gas Company site marked a turning point in the professionalization of North American urban archaeology and in the formalization of developer-funded contract archaeology.
Detroit 139: Archaeology and the Future-Making of a Post- Industrial City
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2019
The future-making efforts currently unfolding in Detroit have direct implications on the extent t... more The future-making efforts currently unfolding in Detroit have direct implications on the extent to which the city’s pasts will be included in the narratives of generations to come. This essay evaluates current tensions between developers and preservation-oriented stakeholders. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for considering how archaeological initiatives and anthropological treatments of heritage might fit within revitalization efforts. Examples of grassroots, community-led projects undertaken by archaeologists and local partners demonstrate the potential for archaeology to contribute to the maintenance of community heritage and the shape of the city’s future.
Making Music in Detroit: Archaeology, Popular Music, and Post-Industrial Heritage
in Contemporary Archaeology and the City, ed. L. McAtackney and K. Ryzewski, Oxford University P... more in Contemporary Archaeology and the City, ed. L. McAtackney and K. Ryzewski, Oxford University Press, pp. 69-90
No Home for the "Ordinary Gamut": A Historical Archaeology of Community Displacement and the Creation of Detroit, City Beautiful
Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park were constructed between 1908 and 1918 as part of Det... more Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park were constructed between 1908 and 1918 as part of Detroit’s City Beautiful Movement. The construction process was a place-making effort designed to implant order on the urban landscape that involved the displacement of a community who represented everything that city planners sought to erase from Detroit’s city center: overcrowding, poverty, immigrants, and transient populations. Current historical archaeological research reveals how the existing ornamental landscape of Roosevelt Park masks the history of a forgotten working-class neighborhood. This synthesis of archival and material evidence details the conditions of life within the neighborhood and of a contentious, decade-long displacement struggle rooted in the inequalities of early-20th-century industrial capitalism. Positioned at the start of a century of controversial urban planning initiatives, the Roosevelt Park case study encourages understandings of displacement as a process that has diachronic and comparative dimensions, both in Detroit and in other urban settings.
Ruin Photography as Archaeological Method: A Snapshot from Detroit
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 1(1): 36-41, 2014
Detroit residents, who are accustomed to living among ruins of all shapes and sizes, tend to view... more Detroit residents, who are accustomed to living among ruins of all shapes and sizes, tend to view popular, monumental ruins like the Michigan Central Station or the Packard Plant as either anathema in urgent need of demolition or as valued places with potential for revitalization. For visitors to the city these very same ruins are frozen in time; they evoke nostalgia and awe. Non-residents’ understanding of a “ruined Detroit” is routinely gathered by gazing upon monumental ruins during a short visit or by capturing images of them on the Internet (Binelli 2012). In order to muse about the failures of modernity and industrialization that appear to make a city like Detroit exceptional, photographers only have to collect the requisite images of select types of abandoned buildings. Systematic archaeological survey, focused areas of study, or multi-scalar inquiry are of no concern; images of a train station, factory, theater, school, hospital, and a handful of empty houses are sufficient data.
Artifact preservation and post-depositional site-formation processes in an urban setting: a geoarchaeological study of a 19th-century neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan
Journal of Archaeological Science (53): 178-189, 2014
A geoarchaeological study was carried out to assess levels of artifact deterioration occurring in... more A geoarchaeological study was carried out to assess levels of artifact deterioration occurring in a historicperiod
urban soil during the 20th century. The study site is a former house-lot in a park created in 1919 by demolition of a residential community in Detroit, Michigan, USA. The results show that despite nearly a century of burial in an urban soil impacted heavily by pollution and other anthropogenic activity, many 19th century artifacts are remarkably well preserved. The observed weathering stability sequence of glass > bone > mortar > plaster > paint is consistent with decreasing solubility product values of the corresponding principal mineral constituent (glass < apatite < portlandite < gypsum < cerrusite). Even severely weathered 19th century nails and mortar can often be distinguished using optical petrographic
and SEM-EDAX methods. The excellent state of artifact preservation is attributed to a calcareous soil microenvironment, and artificial compaction which limited the weathering effects of water and oxygen. Artifact preservation was further enhanced by burial beneath a thick biomantle created by the casting activity of an invasive species of earthworm. However, Lumbricus terrestris may now pose the greatest threat to artifact preservation because casting and burrowing activities are decreasing bulk density, and
promoting the diffusion of air and water into the soil. Early excavation is recommended to recover artifacts in soils impacted by the combined effects of urban pollution and earthworm burrowing. Anthropogenic microparticles smaller than those normally classified as microartifacts were found to be useful indicators of human occupation.
Caribbean Publications by Krysta Ryzewski
Caribbean Historical Archaeology in the 21st Century
The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology, 2020
This chapter reviews trends and developments in Caribbean historical archaeology since 2000. It b... more This chapter reviews trends and developments in Caribbean historical archaeology since 2000. It begins by addressing the effects on the field of recent developments involving politics, natural disasters, technologies, and intellectual orientations. The overview then summarizes major contributions in the archaeology of the African diaspora and plantations, landscapes, contact-period encounters and indigenous persistence, post-emancipation conditions, and material culture studies. It also considers nascent studies of ecology, urban settings, and contemporary archaeology. A discussion of heritage management and public archaeology, practices that have become inseparable from present-day practices of Caribbean historical archaeology, concludes the overview
On AIR: An Archaeological Riff on Montserrat’s World-Famous 1980s Recording Studio
Archaeology Out of the Box, 2023
In the context of the tiny British Caribbean island of Montserrat, Jimmy Buffet is more prophet t... more In the context of the tiny British Caribbean island of Montserrat, Jimmy Buffet is more prophet than pop star. Shortly after Sir George Martin, the ‘fifth Beatle,’ opened Associated Independent Recording (AIR) Studios in May 1979 as a luxurious workplace for A-list musicians, Buffett and members of his Coral Reefer Band traveled to Montserrat to record their upbeat, Caribbean-infused song “Volcano.” The skyline behind AIR Studios was dominated by the peaceful green slopes of the long-dormant Soufrière Hills volcano, serving as picturesque inspiration for the ninth album of the band; a catastrophic eruption seemed just a figment of their imagination. When the volcano awoke, the fate of AIR Studios was already sealed. Six years earlier, in September 1989, category-4 hurricane Hugo swept across the island and destroyed more than 90 percent of the buildings on Montserrat. Although AIR Studios fared better than most, gaping holes and loose shingles on its roof invited rain, tropical vegetation, and animals into the buildings, and their wooden floors soon began to buckle. Thirty-two years after its closure, the site continues to be appreciated as a tangible connection to both the pop icons of the 1980s and innovations in digital recording technology that were pioneered there. Such connections, many stakeholders argue, make the buildings worth preserving as a heritage site whose global status might attract tourists to the island and thereby contribute to local revitalization efforts.
The Soldier Ghaut Petroglyphs on Montserrat, Lesser Antilles
Latin American Antiquity, 2021
Only five years ago, Montserrat was a blank spot on the distribution map of islands in the Lesser... more Only five years ago, Montserrat was a blank spot on the distribution map of islands in the Lesser Antilles where petroglyphs were known. In January 2016, hikers in Soldier Ghaut, a deeply incised watercourse in the northwest of the island, came upon a panel of nine petroglyphs engraved on a nearly vertical wall of volcanoclastic tuff. Soon afterward the petroglyphs were documented by the Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat project (SLAM). Then in January 2018 an additional petroglyph was spotted on a large slab of rock, detached from the rock wall on the opposite side of the ghaut. At the invitation of the Montserrat National Trust (MNT) and with European Union funding, Susana Guimarães and Christian Stouvenot traveled to Montserrat in 2018 to assist in further studies at the site. They conducted photogrammetric documentation and photography under enhanced lighting conditions and inspected the petroglyphs and their context in detail in order to advise MNT about their conservation and provisions for public access. This report presents this new group of petroglyphs and their landscape setting and considers questions of dating and interpretation.
An Archaic site at Upper Blakes on Montserrat: Discovery, context and wider significance
Early Settlers of the Insular Caribbean: Dearchaizing the Archaic (Hofman and Antczak, eds), 2019
This chapter describes a newly discovered site of Archaic Age date on Montserrat, the first known... more This chapter describes a newly discovered site of Archaic Age date on Montserrat, the first known site on the island. Previously, the oldest archaeological site was Trants, an Early Ceramic settlement with earliest colonization dates of around 500 BC. The site at Upper Blakes may document human activity on Montserrat more than two millennia earlier, thus placing it among the earliest known sites in the Lesser Antilles. Here we recount the circumstances leading to the discovery of Upper Blakes, describe the site and its setting, summarize and comment on the lithic material and its technology (especially in comparison with nearby Antigua), present its radiocarbon AMS date and reflect on the wider significance of Upper Blakes for the early occupation of the Lesser Antilles.
“The State of Decay into which the Island Has Fallen”: Education and Social Welfare on Montserrat after emancipation
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2019
The social life of the newly created ‘laboring classes’ in the post-emancipation Caribbean has be... more The social life of the newly created ‘laboring classes’ in the post-emancipation Caribbean has been relatively unexamined across a number of disciplinary perspectives. This paper argues for the need to bring together a variety of sources to enable researchers to gain a better understanding of this important, transitional time in Montserrat’s history. Using evidence gathered from archives in the Caribbean, North America and the British Isles, materials excavated from a previously undocumented schoolhouse structure in the north of the island, and local memories of education on Montserrat, this paper illuminates an almost forgotten aspect of the lives of nineteenth-century laboring classes: the aspiration of education.
A Thorny Endeavor: Historical Archaeology and Diachronic, Regional Landscape Survey in the Caribbean Lesser Antilles
Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity (Knodell and Leppard, eds), 2017
This chapter provides an overview of established and emergent archaeological reconnaissance metho... more This chapter provides an overview of established and emergent archaeological reconnaissance methods in the Caribbean Lesser Antilles and examines how they are applied to the study of historic-period sites and landscapes. The involvement of systematic survey techniques in the study of historic landscapes is not currently a fundamental component of archaeological practice across the region. In places where they are applied, methodological approaches and objectives vary considerably, and are often tailored to accommodate particular insular environments, colonial histories, or heritage preservation initiatives. The relatively few existing examples of multi-method landscape survey succeed in shifting research perspectives from a focus on the high-visibility industrial remains of individual plantation estates to wider landscapes of production and exploitation, viewed comparatively and regionally. In broadening the horizons of Caribbean historical archaeology, these pioneering landscape-based studies raise issues that demand further attention, most notably, those of scale and the comparability of survey data between islands.
Caribbean Irish Connections
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Books by Krysta Ryzewski
The city of Detroit has endured periods of unprecedented industrial growth,
decline, and revitalization between the late nineteenth century and the present.
In Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary
Places, Krysta Ryzewski presents six archaeological case studies of
legendary Detroit institutions—Little Harry speakeasy, the Ransom Gillis
house, the Blue Bird Inn, Gordon Park, the Grande Ballroom, and the Halleck
Street log cabin—that trace the contours of the city’s underrepresented
communities and their relationship to local currents of capitalism and
social justice. Through a combination of rigorous historical archaeological
research and narrative storytelling, Ryzewski deftly contextualizes the cases within the city’s current struggles, including recovery from bankruptcy, and future-oriented recovery e fforts.
Detroit Remains is is the first historical archaeology book focused on Detroit and one of the few to foreground the archaeology of the Great Migration era (ca. 1915–1970). The archaeological scholarship is rooted in collaborative, community-involved, and public-facing initiatives. The case studies examine how power is and has been exercised in Detroit’s communities over the past century: how it was stripped from the city’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century residents, but also how they acquired alternative sources of agency by establishing creative and illicit economies, most of which still operated within the city’s capitalist framework.
Throughout this book, connections run deep between archaeology, heritage, politics, historic preservation, and storytelling. Detroit Remains
demonstrates how the city’s past, present, and future lie not in ruins but
in the tangible archaeological traces of the everyday lives of Detroiters and
their legacies.
Published by University of Alabama Press
This book draws on all the available archaeological evidence (including that from the co-authors' own island-wide survey and excavation project since 2010), as well as newly available archival documents, to trace this little island's long history and heritage. This is not the story of an isolated and remote island: Montserrat is shown rather to be a place intricately connected to the flows of people and goods that have travelled between islands and across the Atlantic at various points in time, both Amerindian and historical. Despite its small size and seeming irrelevance, Montserrat has in fact always been networked into regional and global systems of connectivity. An underlying theme of this volume is resilience. It presents insights from the archaeological and documentary evidence on how the island's inhabitants have coped with often adverse conditions throughout the course of its history-hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, slavery, disease, invasions, and impoverishment-all while remaining proudly connected to heritage that celebrates the accomplishments of island residents.
Detroit / Great Lakes Region Publications by Krysta Ryzewski
urban soil during the 20th century. The study site is a former house-lot in a park created in 1919 by demolition of a residential community in Detroit, Michigan, USA. The results show that despite nearly a century of burial in an urban soil impacted heavily by pollution and other anthropogenic activity, many 19th century artifacts are remarkably well preserved. The observed weathering stability sequence of glass > bone > mortar > plaster > paint is consistent with decreasing solubility product values of the corresponding principal mineral constituent (glass < apatite < portlandite < gypsum < cerrusite). Even severely weathered 19th century nails and mortar can often be distinguished using optical petrographic
and SEM-EDAX methods. The excellent state of artifact preservation is attributed to a calcareous soil microenvironment, and artificial compaction which limited the weathering effects of water and oxygen. Artifact preservation was further enhanced by burial beneath a thick biomantle created by the casting activity of an invasive species of earthworm. However, Lumbricus terrestris may now pose the greatest threat to artifact preservation because casting and burrowing activities are decreasing bulk density, and
promoting the diffusion of air and water into the soil. Early excavation is recommended to recover artifacts in soils impacted by the combined effects of urban pollution and earthworm burrowing. Anthropogenic microparticles smaller than those normally classified as microartifacts were found to be useful indicators of human occupation.
Caribbean Publications by Krysta Ryzewski