Walking a Trail Like Reading a Book

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Public Lands, Public Sites: Research, Engagement, and Collaboration" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Histories are typically drawn up linearly, with events laid out in chronological order and often separated into periods of Early, Middle, and Late to illustrate the processes that make one event lead to another. But when you walk through your hometown, the landscape is a text written with the stories of one’s life, and walking through that landscape, one organizes the stories spatially and not chronologically. The trails that run through the parks we manage present an opportunity to arrange the telling of the past as though reading the landscape as a text, thereby organizing the history and archaeology of that landscape spatially and not chronologically. Drawing from the work of Keith Basso and others, this paper explores how we might create trail guides that take visitors through a landscape of stories and names. Once a visitor can name the land and tell stories about it, they will begin to form a more intimate relationship with that landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Public Lands, Public Sites: Research, Engagement, and Collaboration   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37363.0