The Five Points: Fact vs Fiction

Since the very beginning, the Five Points has been depicted as a neighborhood filled with brothels, gangs, poverty, saloons and crime. The mysteriousness and danger associated with the neighborhood made it a very appealing setting for many novels and movies. Consequently, the popular narrative persisted as the only version of the Five Points. This narrative has very little basis in truth. The story of the Five Points is a great way to demonstrate how archaeology can help debunk harmful, and untruthful biases.

One of the first issues with the Five Points narrative is that it is from the perspective of people who did not live in the neighborhood. A way to fix the biases is to allow people who lived in the neighborhood to tell their own story. Archaeology can help provide the evidence needed to tell that narrative.

While digging at the site of an Irish tenement and saloon archaeologists found artifacts that suggest the neighborhood was not as poor as had been previously assumed. They found a variety of fashionable household goods and clothing, which suggests that the tenants made enough money to have excess after meeting their basic food and housing needs. This is not what was expected. It is clear from the artifacts the narrative being told is a myth. It is hard to get a full archaeological picture because many of the artifacts were destroyed in 9/11. It becomes even more complicated because, in much of the literature on the neighborhood, it is described as a signature slum. Since this is the case it makes it particularly hard to come up with any alternative narrative.

As Reckner so beautifully puts it, “Long before historians’ formal work reaches the attention of most readers (if it ever does), images of the past in the form of novels and newspapers, movies, and television programs have powerfully shaped popular understandings of the past (Barthes, 1988; Leone and Silberman, 1995). This is particularly true in a place like New York City, which figures prominently in national media and mythology (Bodnar, 1992).” The five points allows archaeologists to explore how these narratives come about and why they persist.

As someone from New York, there are still areas of the city that are looked down on the same way as the Five Points. There are certain neighborhoods that my parents tell me to be wary of anytime I go to them. There are no reasons why they should tell me that other than that those neighborhoods are associated with people of lower socioeconomic status. Even then there is no reason why I should be told to be any more careful than I am in my own neighborhood. It just goes to show that the city is organized in a similar manner as it was back in the 1900s and that the same stereotypes still exist today. The neighborhoods are still organized by socio-economic status and as such the myths about those neighborhoods are very much a part of the culture.

Sources:http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/wtcartifacts/

http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/wdat3.htm

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1016032604726

Photos: http://theredlist.com/media/database/settings/cinema/2000-2010/gangs-of-new-york/013-gangs-of-new-york-theredlist.jpg

http://www.lacndb.com/php/America/Five%20Points.gif

Further Reading:

South Street Seaport Museum – History and Archaeology of the Port of New York

N-YHS – The New-York Historical Society

ASHP – The American Social History Project “Who Built America?” Educational Film Series – Five Points Documentary Film

When one looks at an archaeological site one of the questions they are trying to answer is what type of society produced this site. There are a lot of different clues within the archaeological site that can tell help answer that question.  One good example of how social archaeology works is Moundville.

Moundville was an Ancient Native American site located in Mississippi. It was occupied from AD 1000-AD 1450.  It was a village built using Wall-Trench architecture. It was well planned, in a roughly square formation using a mound-plaza layout.  It was also a cultural center. We know this because there were remnants of pottery found at the site.

With just the information above we can tell that Moundville was created by a society that was at least a Segmentary Society. In other words, we can tell that the people who built Moundville were not nomadic people. They lived permanently at Moundville. We can tell this because the settlement was protected forests on three sides. The fact that Moundville was built it in a protected area suggests that there was warfare and warfare only occurs once a settlement becomes permanent. This leads us to deduce that they were a Segmentary Society because there was evidence of agricultural as well as hunting found at the sites surrounding Moundville.

We can also infer that Moundville was the social center because there were many smaller sites surrounding Moundville, suggesting that the most people lived in Moundville. The people at Moundville were producing highly sophisticated pottery, which also leads us to believe that it was the center of this society.  This also suggests that there a hierarchy.

If a society has enough people where not everybody has to produce food, then there are people who can devote their time to other jobs. Once that occurs, the society also needs a ruler, which creates a hierarchy. We also know that there was some sort of hierarchy because the mounds were different in size. One can infer that the bigger mounds were made for the elite and the smaller mounds for the peasants. This becomes especially apparent when one takes the artifacts that were buried in the mound into account.

In conclusion, with the information given by the archaeology, we have managed to reconstruct the story of the society that lived at Moundville.