Unburied Trauma and the Exhumation of History: An American Genealogy

Abstract

On 15 July 2010, the decayed hull of an eighteenth-century sailing vessel was uneart hed by construction workers at the World Trade Center site, adjacent to space allocated for the 9/11 Memorial. The ghostly ship emerged from the excavation several stories below sea level. Its hull, deck and anchor remained virtually intact, despite being submerged for nearly 200 years. It was most likely used as landfill debris by builders in the early nineteenth century, in an effort to expand Manhattan’s coastline across the Hudson River. As further evidence of the instability of history and the complexity of human inscription at the site, roughly half of what is now Ground Zero was actually part of the Hudson River prior to 1797 (Mustain 2010). As waterfront land became increasingly valuable, developers created new real estate through landfilling operations (Cantwell and Wall 2001, p. 225). The materials they used were as diverse and revelatory as the communities founded upon the refuse. Archaeologists have uncovered large quantities of trash in seventeenth-century landfills, indicating that the sites were used as a dumping grounds by local residents and garbage collectors. Other New York landfills contained Native American relics and Caribbean coralline sand, which was used as ship ballast then discarded upon arrival in the harbour (Cantwell and Wall 2001, p. 227).