Public Memory and the Search for Power in American Historical Archaeology

Abstract

How Americans remember the past is often reinforced by landscapes, monuments, commemorative ceremonies, and archaeology. These features and activities often help to create an official public memory that becomes part of a group's heritage. I suggest that public memory can be established by (1) forgetting about or excluding an alternative past, (2) creating and reinforcing patriotism, and/or (3) developing a sense of nostalgia to legitimize a particular heritage. These categories are not mutually exclusive, and the lines that separate these categories may not always be well defined. I show how post–Civil War American landscapes, monuments, and commemorative activities helped to reinforce racist attitudes in the United States that became part of the official memory. African Americans have struggled to revise the official memory of the Civil War, although the power to change this memory has been situational and not always successful, [commemoration, memory, material culture, historical archaeology, landscapes]

Private property, public archaeology: resident communities as stakeholders in American archaeology

“…In his seminal discussion of public memory, Paul Shackel (2001) points out that there is a risk in historical archaeology of telling selective histories that exclude alternative pasts. A public archaeology project that works with a resident community lacking ancestral ties to a particular archaeological site is arguably one way to undermine this sort of 'exclusionary past'.…”

Kin, fictive kin and strategic movement: working class heritage of the Upper Burnett

“…However, local museums and historical societies generally have tended to collaborate in celebrations of the collective memory (Shackel 2001) of the mining elite rather than acknowledging the history and heritage of the workers (see, for example, Shackel and Palus 2006a). At the Gayndah Museum, for example, numerous large items of mining machinery acquired from across the Upper Burnett are displayed with little or no contextualising information.…”

Twenty-First-Century Historical Archaeology

“…As Shackel (2000Shackel ( , 2001Shackel ( , 2003Moyer and Shackel 2008;Shackel and Palus 2006) has shown in depth, historical memory at Harpers Ferry was built exclusively around the events of the American Civil War. Other histories, including those of African Americans and members of the working class, were ignored (also see Little 2007, pp.…”