Management and Memory Work: How Site Management Practices Affect the (Re-)Presentation of Archaeological Landscapes in Western New York

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological landscapes embody shifting conceptualizations of the individuals who live, work, and play at those locations, both in the past and present. While other papers in this session address such changes in the context of the archaeological past, we bring the discussion to the present. We explore these shifts in relationship between place, human, and nonhuman beings at three sites in the Finger Lakes Region of New York: Ganondagan (seventeenth-century CE Seneca village), Bare Hill (a location often associated with Seneca origins), and Lamoka Lake (a village dating to 2400–2600 BCE). These sites, which are respectively managed by New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation (OPRHP); New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC); and jointly by the Archaeological Conservancy and DEC, reflect not only dynamic landscapes in the past (as illustrated by the historical and cultural ecologies of the sites) but also reflect the modern relationships people hold with these locations as embodiments of the past. We particularly explore the disruptive effects of colonialism to current Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of these sites, the practice of site management as a form of colonialism, and how management preserves (or conversely, erases) previous relationships and understandings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36061.0