Digging in the City of Brotherly Love with Rebecca Yamin

We are excited to welcome historical archaeologist Rebecca Yamin into the store for a discussion of her book Digging in the City of Brotherly Love on Thursday, April 25th at 6pm. We encourage all interested parties to register for a ticker through our Eventbrite. Click here to sign up. 

Historic Philadelphia has long yielded archaeological treasures from its past. Excavations required by the National Historic Preservation Act have recovered pottery shards, pots, plates, coins, bones, and other artifacts relating to early life in the city. This updated edition of Digging in the City of Brotherly Love continues to use archaeology to learn about and understand people from the past.

Rebecca Yamin adds three new chapters that showcase several major discoveries from recent finds including unmarked early eighteenth-century burial grounds, one of which associated with the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in the oldest part of the city; a nineteenth-century working-class neighborhood built along the path of what is now Route I-95 and was once home to Native American life; and the remains of two taverns found on the site of the current Museum of the American Revolution.

Yamin describes the research and state-of-the-art techniques used to study these exciting discoveries. In chronicling the value of looking into a city’s past, Digging in the City of Brotherly Love brings to life the people who lived in the early city and the people in the present who study them.

Rebecca Yamin is a historical archaeologist specializing in urban archaeology and the former director of the Philadelphia branch office of John Milner Associates, Inc., a company that specialized in historic preservation and cultural resource management. She is the author of Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution (Temple), which won the 2022 James Deetz Book Prize given by the Society for Historical Archaeology; Rediscovering Raritan Landing: An Adventure in New Jersey Archaeology; the co-author of The Archaeology of Prostitution and Clandestine Pursuits; and the co-editor of Landscape Archaeology: Reading and Interpreting the American Historical Landscape.