Abstract
In 2006 I asked key members of my field team to write narrative vignettes based on the archaeological investigation we had conducted on eight historic lots in New Brunswick, New Jersey (Fig. 9.1). The excavation was done in compliance with Sect. 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and the client was an engineering firm under contract to the New Jersey Department of Transportation.1 In other words, it was your standard CRM (Cultural Resource Management) project done within the usual constraints of time and money as well as explicit excavation and reporting requirements. Four of the lots faced Albany Street, the main street in New Brunswick and the focus of its earliest development; the other four lots faced Water Street, which ran parallel to the Raritan River and eventually to the Delaware and Raritan Canal which was built between the street and the river in the 1830s (Fig. 9.2). A complicated traffic interchange now covers the site.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Oliver Harris, Cara Jones, Phil Richardson, and Hannah Cobb for inviting me to contribute to this volume. It gave me the opportunity to show off the narrative vignettes written by my colleagues, Alex Bartlett, Tod Benedict, and Juliette Gerhardt. I know it was difficult for them, but I really appreciate their efforts and especially the results, which brought the site to life. This article also gave me the opportunity to return to ideas I had developed for comments on a session entitled Exploring Reflexive CRM, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in New Orleans in 2001. Lily Schraeger is the dance teacher who showed me how necessary it is to say things in many different ways. It is a lesson I have not been able to forget.
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Yamin, R. (2012). Through Many Eyes: A Non-hierarchical Approach to Interpreting a Site in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In: Cobb, H., Harris, O., Jones, C., Richardson, P. (eds) Reconsidering Archaeological Fieldwork. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2338-6_9
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