One of the definitions of urban archaeology sites I've read are "pits
within pits within..." the idea that the urban site has been "dug up"
and redeposited from one place to another. An example in New York City
is shown in the land filling that began in recessions (keeps me awake
at night) to create property, the last one the Battery Park complex
abutting the World Trade Center on the west side of the island of
Manhattan extensively filled to create "wealth" which as an economic
pattern generally might follow there but not necessarily the only
reason that land gets made and filled, i.e., the health commissioner
points to the open soggy boxes of filling as places for disease, Mr.
Oothouse I think a distant "Dutch uncle" maybe.

Another is the movement of skin processing tanks for tanning moved
further and further out of the community, breeding places for flies,
though what made much of the original wealth of New York City it's
written, "I don't know, you're going to need shoes" (what Johnny
thought he might want to do when he grew up). started very early in
New Amsterdam.  Local zoning and citizen research moved them finally
out of the city. In North Creek, New York, apparently when the
railroad was built across the country it was also built to the large
concentrated area of hemlock trees and earlier nascent tanneries,
finally processing 10,000 skins or furs a year from all over the world
in as many as four tanneries with sluice ways from the hills carrying
the hemlock log sections for their bark high in tannins, sluiced into
the Tannery Pond which today is a site of public meeting and exhibit
place recently completed in the North Creek and the town of Johnsburg
center. Nearby the original weavers of calico in New York State
started by John Thurman who owned the post office on Wall Street, was
neutral during the American Revolution, was one of the first highway
contractors and also in a partnership to keep the Hudson River clear
of trees and other flotsam and jetsam.

The folk-urban continuum also comes to play I think researched by
anthropologist Robert Redfield, so we have distant related industries
also in the mix. I was trying to say that from what I've see one of
the urban archaeology problems is that you might have a feature that's
chock full of artifacts that you might want to excavate carefully, yet
it may have been redeposited from fire or other ruination (riot,
revolution, etc., after it a French observer stated we had solved our
returning troop unemployment problem in America, as many as 5,000 were
involved in leveling the former battlements and making solid land
where there had been none in Manhattan) filled in in a short couple of
hours or part of a day. Then what good is the stratigraphy if it costs
too much to prove so little.

George Myers