Digging Out after Decades of Fast Capitalism: Addressing Richmond’s Incomplete Archaeological Legacy Through Community-Based Projects and Advocacy

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

As the epicenter of the Lost Cause mythology, Richmond is full of edifices to certain historical ideologies. At the same time, its archaeological record is replete with archaeological failures of enormous proportion. Using political history, development data, and the archaeological archive, this paper will examine how this archaeological absence has been crafted by development pressures, pro-business ideologies and presumptions, and the irrelevance of archaeology to the reification of Confederate myths. It will also provide an introduction to some of the slow archaeology projects now ongoing in the city to address these gaps using curatorial interventions, community consultation, digital archaeology, and political advocacy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 254