Archaeology of Homelessness

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of reading Courtney Singleton’s recent Columbia dissertation based on her field work at Pelham Bay Park in New York City: “Vague Dwelling: An Archaeology of The Pelham Bay Park Homeless Encampment.“

This dissertation is perhaps finest example of the systematic archaeological documentation of homelessness that I’ve read and should become a crucial text for demonstrating how archaeology of the contemporary world can produce new knowledge, inform social policy, and critique conventional archaeological methods and assumptions. 

I won’t review the dissertation here, but I’m very excited to fold Singleton’s new work into my chapter on homelessness. As is my typical practice, I’ll highlight a few of my key take aways.

1. Methods. One of the most significant aspects of this dissertation is the systematic and rigorous nature of the methods adopted by Singleton and her team. This is not meant as a critique of other efforts to use archaeological methods to document homelessness, but instead to celebrate this dissertation as the most archaeologically rigorous so far. It draws upon intensive survey practices and systematic excavation of deposits produces over the past 60 years. Singleton and team show attentiveness toward formation processes, develop typologies of recovered material (see below), and present results quantitatively. Absent are direct appeals to ethnographic work. This isn’t a criticism of either Singleton’s approach or more ethnographic approaches, but it does highlight the distinct character of her work as exclusively (or almost exclusively) archaeological.

2. Modern Things. One of the most interesting challenge that Singleton faces is the need to create typologies of modern objects that takes into account their materiality and their uses over time. Singleton is blunt here: creating these typologies was a massive challenge. This was as much because of the massive quantity and diversity of modern artifacts and material types and the difficulty association artifacts and materials with certain consistent functions. To her credit, Singleton avoids getting lost in the woods of ever narrower typologies (and speculative artifact histories), and manages to create enough order out of the modern chaos not only to parse the complex strategies employed by homeless people at the Pelham site to dwell there, but also to discern how changing material signatures reflected different material realities of life at this site.        

3. Marginal Spaces. Part of the story of the Pelham park homeless encampment was the concomitant growth of a New York City landfill across Eastchester Bay from the site. Homeless who lived in the park not only availed themselves to the relative seclusion that the park provided from the bustle of the streets, but also, at least for during the time when the landfill was active, took advantage of access to discarded material at the site. The presence of objects that do not align neatly with the dates of occupation of the park’s homeless community likely reflects salvage strategies made possible by the proximity to the landfill. 

The coincidence of landfills and marginal communities is long understood among both archaeologists and students of urbanism. More interesting still is the role of parks in creating marginal places where individuals using drugs, seeking some peace from the bustle of streets, or hoping to find privacy to perform rituals of hygiene or sexual acts. I remained fascinated by the confluence of marginalized individuals and spaces that, whatever their economic value (after all, parks and landfills do offer some economic utility), tend to not be socially productive for the dominant community. How does public space especially in regimes dominated by the push toward privatization afford individuals who lack private wealth to survive? And how do these practices reinforce the desire to privatize or otherwise restrict access to these spaces and limit the rights of the public at large?         

4. Race, Class, and Society. One thing missing in this dissertation is any sustained consideration of race or class as race or class. This is not a criticism necessarily, but it stuck me as a pretty bold absence especially considering the longstanding interest in both of these issues among historical archaeologists. It would not have been a massive leap to from concepts of dwelling and home to notions of the development of class consciousness or social cohesion among individuals identified by the dominant society as homeless. Instead, one could detect a vague thread of critique directed such ways of thinking in Singleton’s rebuke of the Occupy movement’s initial reluctance to recognize the homeless as part of the 99% at their camps. It would have been interesting to consider whether the commonality of practices among those identified as homeless in Pelham park contributed to a kind of collective awareness that gave rise to self-conscious strategies of collective action? Certainly Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg hint at a similar development of social cohesion among the residents of the Pit in their ethnography of drug addicts in Righteous Dopefiend (2009).  

Race is also largely ignored in the discussion of the community at Pelham Park (with the exception of one short section on a history of Black dolls and children’s toys). Again, I don’t want to make this out to be a liability of this work. Instead, I think it reflects a bit of ambivalence in the field of the archaeology of the contemporary world with race as a category of analysis in the US. It may be that notions of contemporaneity within our predominantly white field sit awkwardly with the archaeological and historical priorities present in communities of color which may see the present or the last 50 years as a period of failed promises or a periodization scheme that does reflect their lived experience in a meaningful way.  

5. Archaeology of Care. Finally, I loved the final chapters of this dissertation which demonstrated how the finding of the survey and excavation could contribute to public policy. At the same time, Singleton’s work was not dogmatic or proscriptive in any way. Instead, she demonstrated how an attentiveness to the complex lifeways of the homeless not only affords these communities the dignity of a past as well as a present constructed through a series of deliberate strategies and decisions, but also perspective that allows for a future that is informed by choices and priorities of the groups themselves.

To me, this is the basis for an archaeology of care. By studying others we not only recognize (and validate or even normalize) their lifeways, but also give them a voice.