Conflict Landscapes: Mitigating Inter-generational Trauma through Collaborative Archaeology

Summary

Traditional Indigenous landscapes are imbued with cultural meaning and value. After contact, Indigenous trails often gained uses for military conflict, immigrant travel, and removal of Indigenous people from their homelands, adding additional meaning to the landscape. Nevada’s historic Stewart Indian School is another Indigenous landscape later used in the federal effort to assimilate Native children. Both case studies demonstrate that processes of governmentality, disciplinary power, and legislative processes entangled with biopolitics and knowledge production have similarly acted upon landscapes, human bodies, and material culture. In the employment of collaborative archaeology, living community members with blood and other ties to these landscapes are contributing tribal knowledge and oral history as research partners. Through such partnerships, our work groups have developed a more complete picture of our shared history. Holistic approaches to understanding the past also may assist mitigation of inter-generational trauma and historical grief accompanying many such landscapes of conflict. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Interpretation and Presentation of Archaeological and Cultural Heritage Sites: Evolving Horizons   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 945