The Foundation of Meaning
Author(s): Philip Levy
Year: 2013
Summary
Sometime in the 1870s, a small set of subterranean stones became an object of importance and pilgrimage. Promoters, travel writers, and visitors claimed that the stones were the original foundations of George Washington’s boyhood home near Fredericksburg Virginia. The site was already well known as the site of Parson Weems’s famous Cherry Tree parable, but as the landscape recovered from the Civil War, residents look for other ways to have a less troubled American past. Washington provided the answer. This paper looks at how a discourse of historical pilgrimage formed around these stones, and significantly, how this discourse centrally used the images of excavation in new and creative ways. The stones present an early popular cultural and tourism-based version of the idea that the ground carries a truer truth than can stories while at the same serving as an example of what James Cook called an "artful deception."
Cite this Record
The Foundation of Meaning. Philip Levy. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Leicester, England, U.K. 2013 ( tDAR id: 428264)
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Keywords
General
Tourism
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Travel
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Washington
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1730s - 1920s
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 320