Counter-monuments and the Perdurance of Place

Abstract

In this paper, I critically examine contemporary commemorative forms and practices known as ‘counter-monuments’ from an archaeological standpoint, in the process interrogating the conceptual underpinnings of the monument taxon as it is currently understood. Drawing on Tim Ingold's notion of perdurance, and through an exploration of counter-monumental concerns with form, siting and proxemics, I argue that memorialization can be seen as relationally emergent in the experiences of particular places. This claim is advanced through a discussion of the Cedar Creek Earthworks, a Woodland Period (c. 1–1550 ad) enclosure near Windsor, Canada, whose status as a monument can be understood, not as an ostentatious appeal to past events, but as a magnet for drawing out and assembling human and non-human relations in place.