Description

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The first comprehensive discussion of the historical archaeology of homelessness

In a time when the idea of home has become central to living the American dream, The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed
brings to the forefront the concept of homelessness. The book points
out that homelessness remains underexplored in historical archaeology, a
fact which may reflect societal biases and marginalization, and it
provides the field's first comprehensive discussion of the subject.

Daniel
Sayers argues that the unhomed and the home have been inherently
interconnected in the real world across the past several centuries.
Sayers builds a conceptual model that focuses on this dynamic and uses
it to generate new insights into pre-Civil War communities of Maroons
and Indigenous Americans, Great Depression-era hobo communities, and
Midwest farmsteads. In doing so, he highlights the social complexities,
ambiguities, and significance of the home and the unhomed in the
archaeological record. Using a variety of data sources including
documentary records and material culture and drawing on extensive
fieldwork, Sayers illuminates how homelessness is created, reproduced,
and disparaged by the dominant culture.

The book also
emphasizes the importance of applied archaeology. Through these studies,
Sayers contends that activist archaeologists have a role--and
responsibility--to share their knowledge to help policy makers and
stakeholders understand the unhomed, homelessness, and the American
experience in this area.

A
volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological
Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney and Krysta Ryzewski