Mark Walker's List: Labor History and Archaeology

• Each individual feature was quickly filled though the dates when this occurred across these properties ranged between 1820-50.

• Most of the 300 skeletons unearthed were male, and many of them showed signs of years of heavy work: joint and tendon inflammation, compressed vertebrae, hernias, and spinal problems, archaeologists said.
• Many ailments "seem to hark back to work as laborers, in transport and carrying of heavy loads, in an especially humid environment, circumstances that makes one think of the burial of individuals who worked in port areas of the city," the office said in a statement.
• The dig yielded a glimpse into a working-class community that was "humble and marked by strong ties and solidarity among its members,"

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• These were the first bones clearly identifiable as the workers who lived in the city; and they reveal the terrible price they paid to fulfil the Pharaoh's dream.

• The population of Amarna had the shortest stature ever recorded from Egypt's past, but they would also have been worked hard on the Pharaoh's ambitious plans for his new capital. 

   The temples and palaces required thousands of large stone blocks. Working in summer temperatures of 40C (104F), the workers would have had to chisel these out of the rock and transport them 1.5 miles (2.5 km) from the quarries to the city. 

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  Reconstruction of Amarna which was six miles (10km) across                   <!-- S IMED -->          City scale revealed          <!-- E IMED -->

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   The bone remains show many workers suffered spinal and other injuries. "These people were working very hard at very young ages, carrying heavy loads," says Professor Rose.  

   "The incidence of youthful death amongst the Amarna population was shockingly high by any standard." Not many lived beyond 35. Two-thirds were dead by 20.  

• In 1901 Seebohm Rowntree – a York chocolate manufacturer – published one of the classic texts of early sociology. His work inspired decades of social reform to eradicate poverty and construct a welfare state. Now, archaeologists in York are excavating the remains of the very urban slums that were the subject of Rowntree’s study.
• During his 1899 York survey (the first of three), investigators visited every working class home in the city, making records on 11,560 families or 46,754 individuals. Rowntree established a measure of poverty in terms of a minimum weekly sum of money ‘necessary to enable families … to secure the minimum necessaries of a healthy life’. These included fuel, lighting, rent, food, clothing, and household and personal items, according to family size.

  • Household budgets

  • Rowntree survey
• The critical thing for Rowntree was whether income was sufficient to ensure the minimum calorific intake and nutritional balance necessary to avoid illness or weight-loss. According to this measure, 27.84% of the total population of York lived below ‘the poverty line’ (a concept Rowntree invented). Of these, 9.91% lived in ‘primary poverty’, which meant they lacked the income to meet basic needs, and 17.73% in ‘secondary poverty’, which meant that income was sufficient but too much was being spent on other things. A subtlety of Rowntree’s analysis was his appreciation that people tended to move in and out of poverty during their lives, often being poor in early childhood or old age, but better-off when of working age – an observation which gave rise to his concept of ‘the poverty cycle’.
• During the 19th century, however, occupation became more intensive, perhaps as nearby houses were turned over to multiple tenancies, and what had perhaps once been elegant gardens became functional backyards. ‘The yards were generally surfaced with cindery material, with small areas of brick hard-standing,’ explains YAT field officer Kurt Hunter- Mann. ‘Rubbish pits and the occasional animal burial (probably of pets) also point to ever more intensive occupation, although these yards at least had not been infilled with more housing.’ The finds also reflected declining fortunes, from the fine ceramics of the 17th and 18th century levels, to mass-produced alcoholic containers in those of the 19th and early 20th.

  • Yard areas and archaeology
• The York working class of a century ago was not an undifferentiated homogeneous mass. Housing quality was finely graded. A sizeable late 19th century house – the former 25 Palmer Lane in Block D – had fine quarry-tiled floors. By contrast, five houses fronting onto Lower Dundas Street in Block E were at some point subdivided into ten back-to-backs, each house then comprising a tiny one-up/one-down residence. The former backyard area now contained five front doors and therefore became Dundas Court. The backyard had formerly contained a five-cubicle toilet over a cess-pit, and this was now rebuilt as a communal toilet block with a tipper-flush mechanism (see box feature). Around 50 people must have shared use of this facility, half of them having to walk round the block to reach it. It remained in use until the 1930s.

  • Distinctions w/in working class.
    Yard areas

• So small were the two-ups/two-downs in this street that if you stood with your arms outstretched you could almost have reached from one side of the house to the other. Either side, separating you from your neighbours, was a partition wall formed of a single course of bricks.

  Beneath your feet was a single layer of damp and dirty bricks sitting directly on bare earth. A major home improvement at some point was a film of concrete over the top. To stand in these spaces today as the foundations are excavated is to experience a world which feels as alien as the Middle Ages. Yet there are people still alive who lived in them.

  One of them, a pre-war resident of Haver Lane, recalls that it was ‘A very narrow little street – all the children played outside.’ No wonder: they could hardly have played inside.

  • Housing conditions

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