My "Dutch" uncle

One of the definitions of urban archaeology sites I've read are "pits within pits within..." the idea that the urban site has been "dug up" and redeposited from one place to another. An example in New York City is shown in the land filling that began in recessions (keeps me awake at night) to create property, the last one the Battery Park complex abutting the World Trade Center on the west side of the island of Manhattan extensively filled to create "wealth" which as an economic pattern generally might follow there but not necessarily the only reason that land gets made and filled, i.e., the health commissioner points to the open soggy boxes of filling as places for disease, Mr. Oothouse I think a distant "Dutch uncle" maybe. Another is the movement of skin processing tanks for tanning moved further and further out of the community, breeding places for flies, though what made much of the original wealth of New York City it's written, "I don't know, you're going to need shoes" (what Johnny thought he might want to do when he grew up) started very early in New Amsterdam. Local zoning and citizen research moved them finally out of the city. In North Creek, New York, apparently when the railroad was built across the country it was also built to the large concentrated area of hemlock trees and earlier nascent tanneries, finally processing 10,000 skins or furs a year from all over the world in as many as four tanneries with sluice ways from the hills carrying the hemlock log sections for their bark high in tannins, sluiced into the Tannery Pond which today is a site of public meeting and exhibit place recently completed in the North Creek and the town of Johnsburg center. Nearby the original weavers of calico in New York State started by John Thurman who owned the post office on Wall Street, was neutral during the American Revolution, was one of the first highway contractors and also in a partnership to keep the Hudson River clear of trees and other flotsam and jetsam. The folk-urban continuum also comes to play I think researched by anthropologist Robert Redfield, so we have distant related industries also in the mix. I was trying to say that from what I've see one of the urban archaeology problems is that you might have a feature that's chock full of artifacts that you might want to excavate carefully, yet it may have been redeposited from fire or other ruination (riot, revolution, etc., after it a French observer stated we had solved our returning troop unemployment problem in America, as many as 5,000 were involved in leveling the former battlements and making solid land where there had been none in Manhattan) filled in in a short couple of hours or part of a day. Then what good is the stratigraphy if it costs too much to prove so little.