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Trash Talk
Thursday, February 8th at 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
$10
A Lively Discussion of 17th Century Refuse, Recycling, and the Reshaping of Manahatta’s Shoreline
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What was “trash” in 17th-Century New Amsterdam? Who tossed it? Where was it tossed? Who collected or neglected it? How did trash change the shape and shoreline of Manahatta? What do anthropologists and archeologists make of 400-year-old shards and bones? How does the debris help interpret the story of old New Amsterdam and today’s New York? “We walk on our own history,” Robin Nagle reminds us.Join Robin Nagle, Anthropologist-in-Residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation and Clinical Professor in Liberal Studies at NYU, and Michael T. Lucas, Curator of Historical Archeology, New York State Museum, as they help us sort through the trash.
The program will be moderated by Robert Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian.
Robin Nagle is anthropologist-in-residence with the city’s Department of Sanitation. Her book, Picking Up, explores the surprising challenges and hazards of waste management in New York, and includes accounts of her time on the job as a sanitation worker. She is also a clinical professor in Liberal Studies at New York University, where she teaches anthropology, environmental studies, urban history, and oral history.
Michael T. Lucas is Curator of Historical Archaeology at the New York State Museum in Albany where he manages a collection of over 5 million artifacts recovered from archaeological sites across the state of New York, including a sizable collection of Dutch artifacts from Manhattan. He broadly studies rural production, labor, and community formation during the 17th through 19th centuries. His current field research program focuses on the contributions and struggles of African American farmers in the Hudson River Valley from 1780 to 1880.
Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University, is editing a documentary history of the Covid pandemic in New York City. He is a former Fulbright lecturer in American Studies and a member of the New York Academy of History. His books include Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York and All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York.