An Archaeology of Violent American Landscapes in Rosewood and Beyond

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Hidden Battlefields: Power, Memory, and Preservation of Sites of Armed Conflict" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Landscape and violence are social processes. The complex interplay between the two is a key facet to racism and other forms of intolerance animating American history. Inspired by this session’s abstract, this paper examines the role archaeology plays in researching the violence inherent to many American places. The case study combines 15 years of research on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre with more recent research on similar events elsewhere. This reveals the complex role culture plays in producing uniquely violent American landscapes. Events like race riots and lynching are decidedly multiscalar. The social processes at work here mirror those unevenly concentrating vulnerability to climate change across society. This paper examines how all of these various social processes are playing out in the communities surrounding Rosewood, Florida over the past century, and the connections these local arrangements share with countless communities across America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Hidden Battlefields: Power, Memory, and Preservation of Sites of Armed Conflict   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology