Friday, March 20, 2009

The strange case of the missing NYC landmark...

At io9 there is an interesting posting: "Digging Deep: 24 Science Fiction Archaeologists" I commented: "The excavation on the Moon in Kubrick's and Clarke's "2001 A Space Odyssey" was archaeological I thought, though I don't recall who was in charge. From the original short story and idea I think "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke. Conforms to the idea of archaeology unleashing some unknown force as stated here, like in "The Exorcist" by excavating something unknown, like a "devil pipe" on a site I worked on that had a ship buried in it in lower Manhattan years ago." I stated at facebook when asked for the name of the ship buried in Manhattan referred to above: "They named it after Harold Ronson of HRO the developers company they had developing some of the last parking lots the "Ronson" ship. We found it, I and an African American and a backhoe operator, West Point MP during WWII in the last test of three permitted, they were intent on excavating in the backyards there the archaeologists. They represented a British consortium that became National Westminster Bank. It was a "trailer truck" of the 18th century thought built before 1740 about 80' by 25', which we know little about, the warships however much ado about everything. They gave us from Dec to March to empty it out and document parts of it and the bow was taken out and conserved at Newport News Mariners Museum, VA the "apple-cheek" type it was called. Ship worms (teredo) of the N. Atlantic and Caribbean in it IDed by a biologist. Some frags of a woman's jaw too were found I was told but not publicly described. It was a hulk used to create landfill along the former shore."
And: "One of the archaeologists thought it was the derelict stated in the city council meeting minutes as a nuisance though a location was not given. Very early in New Amsterdam there's also cited an "old shipwreck" nearby Philippe du Trieux whose property became the Isaac Allerton Warehouse, outside the Wall for the English doing business there. Isaac Allerton is reburied in New Haven in the cemetery Yale University maintains. He's also named in Allerton Ave. in the Bronx a large street, the exit between the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Gardens on the oldest motor parkway in the US the Bronx River Parkway. He kept a home in New Haven had business in Maine and "abandoned" the Pilgrims, he a Puritan, apparently a partial construction's archaeology discovered discussed "In Small Things Forgotten" by J. Deetz. Once upon a time a monument erected by the Mayflower Society was up in the Seaport, across the street from where Alfred E. Smith grew up, first Catholic to run for President, I reported."