Rebecca Yamin and Donna J. Seifert have given us a gem of a book. They were committed to “producing work that contributes to scholarship and is accessible to the interested nonspecialist” (p. xviii), and they succeeded admirably. The authors draw on their own research in historical archaeology as well as that of others who have studied prostitution and clandestine pursuits.
Many historical archaeologists will recognize Yamin and Seifert as uniquely qualified to discuss these topics. Each has decades of experience that she brings to the discussion, having previously published extensively on brothel sites. But if readers think they are simply going to encounter a familiar summary of previous findings, they will be pleasantly surprised. This book may include sites with which and individuals with whom historical archaeologists are familiar, but the authors present data in new ways and provide interpretations that both expand anything they have previously written about and go into richer detail than they have before. It turns out there are, indeed, new things to learn about the archaeology of prostitution and clandestine pursuits.
Most of the book concerns prostitution. In addition to the sites they have worked on in New York City and Washington, DC, Yamin and Seifert incorporate other archaeologists’ research into brothels, bordellos, and saloons found from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. The authors compare and contrast assemblages from contemporaneous brothels and working-class households in the same neighborhoods, and they compare brothel assemblages from different time periods and locations. We therefore gain some idea of the quality of life for prostitutes and sex workers in different times and places. One chapter discusses prostitution in American cities, focusing on excavations in New York City; Washington, DC; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Los Angeles. The following chapter provides in-depth case studies of brothels at the Five Points neighborhood in New York City and near the White House in Washington, DC. A chapter on brothel sites in the American West brings the prostitution section of the book to a close.
The authors then move into a discussion of the archaeology of clandestine pursuits, both public and private. It might seem at first that these two chapters are out of place and really have nothing to do with prostitution. Yamin and Seifert, however, skillfully tie them all together by emphasizing the shared themes, including unconventional activity, the defiance of rules and customs, and the intentionally hidden object, all of which are addressed throughout the book. Consequently, in the chapter on public clandestine pursuits, archaeological interpretations of workplace and prison resistance, the Underground Railroad, smuggling, and piracy are incorporated from multiple sites. The chapter on private spaces and clandestine pursuits focuses on objects that were meant to be hidden, providing us with a completely different window into people's lives in the past. These include messages scratched on windowpanes, objects concealed following English folk traditions, objects associated with African American spiritual practices, children's play spaces, and personal objects hidden in military contexts and homeless camps.
As might be expected, the studies that Yamin and Seifert draw together here were conducted by archaeologists using a variety of theoretical perspectives and methodologies. The authors nonetheless skillfully weave these together with the theoretical thread of agency. The clandestine activities they explore all “display agency in opposition to accepted norms of behavior, in some cases to the law and in all cases to playing it safe in spite of various constraints” (p. 2). It is a refreshingly narrow application of agency theory, “agency as a continuum on the spectrum of choice” (p. 96), grounded in the specific activities, spaces, and materials of an archaeology of the unconventional.
In the closing chapter, Yamin and Seifert return to prostitution, examining it as a special kind of “unconventional.” It is clearly different from the other kinds of clandestine activities discussed in the book, not least because it was never really clandestine and not always illegal, but also because “prostitution in the present does not seem so different from prostitution in the past” (p. 144). They show that the current debate about whether or not to decriminalize prostitution is both complicated and long-lived, stretching well into the nineteenth century. They explicitly examine what difference it makes for them to be twenty-first-century women writing about prostitution.
This book should find a wide audience among historical archaeologists, and it would be an excellent supplemental text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses. Yamin and Seifert have done us all a great service by bringing the past of prostitution and clandestine pursuits to our present.
