Monuments that Weren’t: Reckoning with Unmarked Histories of Violence

Summary

With recent events in the United States, monuments and their powerful implications have been widely covered across media outlets. Less often considered, however, are the monuments that were never built in the first place. This paper grapples with these questions archaeologically, ethnographically and historically by considering monuments and memory through extremely well-explored cases in Bavaria and through other far less discussed cases in the Northeastern U.S. It considers the historical narratives that American public school students grow up learning in relation to monuments and material markers, and discusses potential pedagogical approaches for exploring histories of monuments that never were. Drawing from Indigenous theories of settler colonialism, it seeks to probe possibilities for how future memory work might be envisioned as part of archaeological teaching and public engagement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21580