Lamp glass When you describe a room in your house, you probably begin with the couches and chairs, the bed and bookshelves, or the refrigerator and the oven. How often do you think about lamps and ceiling lights? While interior lighting is common today, before the [...]
Soda bottle The picture above (Figure 1) shows pieces of glass from a soda bottle found in the Webster and Phillips homes in Seneca Village. Throughout history, soda has been an essential beverage at parties and for leisure time at home. However, in [...]
Smoking pipe Figure 1: A smoking pipe excavated from Seneca Village. (Photo courtesy of the NYC Archaeological Repository) Background My artifact is a ceramic pipe from the nineteenth century, most likely produced in the United States. The date of production is [...]
Porter and ale bottle The embossing on the remnants of this bottle reads “ILA,” “PORTE,” and “ALE,” and it was found between the sites of the Webster and Phillips homes. While the first two words, or fragments thereof, do not give much information about the object [...]
Perfume bottle First Impressions This bottle (Figures 1 and 2) was excavated from the buried ruins of the Wilson family house in Seneca Village. At a glance, it looks very similar to modern perfume bottle designs. It has a threaded [...]
Toothbrush handle Today we take good oral hygiene for granted, but this is only a recent phenomenon in human history. This is due to factors like the discovery that fluoride prevents tooth decay and antibiotics can cure abscesses, not to mention improved nutrition, maternal and infant [...]
Sarsaparilla bottle The broken sarsaparilla bottle shown in Figure 1 was excavated from the buried ruins of the Wilson family household. Like many objects recovered as part of the Seneca Village Project, this artifact provides a more nuanced understanding of what the everyday lives of this [...]
Wine bottle Seneca Village was a community of free African Americans and European immigrants (mostly Irish) that existed in Uptown New York City between 1825 and 1857. The land making up Seneca Village was later purchased by the city government, and Central Park was built where [...]
Plate While excavating at the site of Seneca Village in Central Park, archaeologists found a variety of artifacts at the Wilson house. The Wilsons were a landowning family, and William Godfrey Wilson, the head of the household, was marked as a person of color by the 1850 [...]
Bowl The Wilson family is one of the most prominent examples for understanding Seneca Village and its culture. Certain objects, such as a ceramic whiteware bowl, can tell us about their everyday eating style and what their kitchen was possibly like. Figure 1: Whiteware bowl, [...]