Landscapes of forgetting and structural silence in the American Southeast

Abstract

Archaeological studies of memory have shown how the past is continually resurrected through selective practices of remembrance. Strategies of social amnesia have received less attention, however. The US southeast provides a useful vantage point for exploring how landscape and the built environment legislated acts of forgetting at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Whereas platform mounds and plazas mediated tensions between remembrance and erasure within communities prior to the arrival of Europeans, later colonial encroachments on Indigenous lands led to the increasing importance of these features as anchors of memory. This shifting, topological record embodied heterogenous, disjunctive framings of temporality.

Archaeology in 2022: Counter‐myths for hopeful futures

“…Embracing the politics of our discipline opens up new narrative opportunities that connect ancient and more recent pasts to the present and future and gives us scope to reinterpret some fundamental assumptions about method and theory (Cobb, 2022). At the same time, more orthodox liberalism does not provide the tools for actual human liberation.…”