"This, of course, would be desirable": Nostalgia and Dispossession at the United States Bicentennial

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Towards a More Inclusive Archaeology (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The United States’ bicentennial celebrations from 1976-1981 prompted a nationwide attempt to reconstruct and commemorate Revolutionary-era landscapes with unprecedented vigor. These efforts were particularly widespread in Tidewater Virginia. At Yorktown, the site of the final surrender of the War of Independence, the National Park Service embarked upon a burst of land acquisition and restoration of the landscape to its 1781 appearance. During this process, the Park Service forcibly displaced a historic African-American community founded by freedpeople during the Civil War. In this paper, we expand this particular moment of racialized dislocation in the name of historic preservation outward to explore the ramifications of this collision of nostalgia, modernity, and ruination--both for those who do not fit neatly into a specific historicized landscape and for those who partake in that landscape. Further, we examine the possibility of resurrection of this erased landscape through documentary analysis, GIS, archaeology, and descendant community participation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Towards a More Inclusive Archaeology (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology