Provenance and Power: Decolonizing Powhatan's Mantle

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Popularly known as “Powhatan’s Mantle,” the shell-decorated and sewn animal skins are an iconic object of material culture from seventeenth-century Virginia. On display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, we argue that the Mantle’s provenance and possible links to Indigenous cosmology have been obscured by four centuries of colonial domination and interpretation. This paper will review the Mantle’s known chain of possession from archival and historical references to the Tradescant family and more recent direct physical observations of the object. In an effort to decolonize the Mantle we draw on Indigenous cosmologies and iconographies as a possible way to relink the object to a dynamic and symbolically rich Algonquian worldview.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32983