Below Baltimore

Society for Historical Archaeology James Deetz Book Award

The first synthesis of the archaeological heritage of Baltimore

Below Baltimore provides the first detailed overview of the rich archaeological heritage of the people and city of Baltimore. Drawing on a combined five decades of experience in the Chesapeake region and compiling 70 years of published and unpublished records, Adam Fracchia and Patricia Samford explore the layers of the city’s material record from the late seventeenth century to the recent past.

Fracchia and Samford focus on major themes and movements such as Baltimore’s growth into a mercantile port city, the city’s diverse immigrant populations and the history of their foodways, and the ways industries—including railroads, glass factories, sugar refineries, and breweries—structured the city’s landscape. Using insights from artifacts and the built environment, they detail individual lives and experiences within different historical periods and show how the city has changed over time.

Synthesizing a large amount of information that has never before been gathered in one place, Below Baltimore demonstrates how urban archaeology can approach cities as larger collective artifacts of the past, where excavations can uncover patterns of inequality in urbanization and industrialization that connect to social and economic processes still at work today.