Temporal Tourists and the Colonization of Time: Spatiotemporal Identities in Late 19th and Early 20th-Century New Jersey

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Living and the Dead: New Interpretations of Above- and Below-Ground Cultural Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Landscapes are wrought into existence by the values humans apply to them. Reciprocally, the spaces we occupy, travel to, and through craft social identities. This paper investigates the relationship between temporalities and landscapes and the implications for people interacting with differing spaces, specifically in early 20th-century New Jersey. To accomplish this, we explore the impact of landscapes occupying different temporalities. What identities are validated by assigning a temporality manufactured by modernity and industrial capitalism to an environment, and what is implied by the absence of these qualities? The domestication of time required by industrial capitalism reordered the physical and cognitive sense of space. Areas subjected to this new timesense are presented as modern and productive. Inversely, less developed and rural environments were interpreted as anachronistic, unproductive, and out-of-time with the modern world. We argue that the dialectic produced contributed to and reinforced modern and white identities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Living and the Dead: New Interpretations of Above- and Below-Ground Cultural Historical Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow