On Friday, March 13, 12-1 p.m., Krysta Ryzewski, associate professor of anthropology at Wayne State University, will speak in Room 2218, School of Education Building, as part of the UMMAA Brown Bag Lecture Series.
In Ryzewski’s talk, “An Inconvenient Past: Detroit vs. Slow Archaeology,” she will discuss the discovery, restoration, and sudden destruction of a nineteenth-century log cabin in Detroit.
In 2018 the nineteenth-century Halleck Street Log Cabin was rediscovered by chance in a blighted Great Migration-era neighborhood of Detroit. It quickly became the centerpiece of an enthusiastic community-led restoration and educational project in the neighboring city of Hamtramck, before it met and untimely and sudden demolition at the hands of the City of Detroit in February 2019. This presentation recounts the archaeological investigations of the cabin in the context of the city’s blight removal efforts. It also uses the controversy surrounding the city’s demolition to discuss how federal policies towards blight removal are adversely affecting the identification and preservation of poor working-class historic resources in postindustrial cities.
The Museum’s Brown Bag Lecture Series is free and open to the public.