Landscape Marking, the Creation of Meaning, and the Construction of Sacred and Secular Spaces: Rethinking The Birney "Mound" in the City of Bay City

Summary

The so-called "Birney Mound" on the Saginaw River in lower Michigan is revisited from the vantage point of long term landscape perception, marking, naming, and memory. The natural raised postglacial beach feature, a deposit of light sand, is the major landscape prominence on the Saginaw River drainage. At times during high water stands in the basin the location was the entrepot to the system from Lake Huron, and during later recessional episodes became the first highly visible landform encountered in upstream travel. The "mound" was employed for ritual purposes and cumulative mortuary behaviors for 5000 years. As recently as the late 18th century it harbored a Native American cemetery, and during the early 19th century it continued its prominent role of place as the site of major treaty negotiations. Such continuity of use reifies its status as a persistent place with attached and transmitted intergenerational information, and potentially transcending specific named ethnic/tribal groups; it is a cumulative historical space. This rethinking of the Birney "Mound" clearly situates the locale as a multigenerational landscape anchor point in indigenous knowledge and wayfinding systems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19918