Connecting Past and Present Landscapes through Museum Education and Public Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Broader Impacts and Teaching: Engaging with Diverse Audiences" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Native American mound sites and their inhabitants are often misunderstood by local communities and are severely underrepresented in educational curricula despite being a primary research focus for North American archaeologists. These monuments stand as testament to the creativity and skill of their builders and provide important, material touchstones between modern populations and the ancient past, yet they are rapidly disappearing due to erosion, farming, development, and looting. Education aimed at populations who interact with mound sites as part of their quotidian landscape is key to their protection and to engendering respect for past and present Native communities. During summer 2019, in pursuit of this goal, we opened an exhibit focusing on Native American moundbuilders in the Wilkinson County Museum in rural southwestern Mississippi. The exhibit’s goal is to connect visitors with the past inhabitants of their land by emphasizing how a shared landscape has led to similar lifeways though time (e.g., hunting, fishing, and cooking similar game; use of familiar natural resources; and construction of communal and ritual structures). This paper will describe the methods we used to achieve this goal and evaluate its effectiveness as well as discussing future steps necessary to expand its impact.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Broader Impacts and Teaching: Engaging with Diverse Audiences

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32190