Driving the Past: The Palimpsest Road

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Retelling Time in Indigenous-Colonial Interactions across North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The road is a quintessential piece of the American imaginary, connecting the landscape, and providing senses of freedom, movement, adventure, and discovery. Reconceptualized, however, the road can stand as a structure which confines and constrains, enabling forces of domination and obfuscating history. As it remains through time, the road provides an imprint in the palimpsest of the landscape, a remaining line which connects the past, present and future. For Japanese American incarceration, roads offer enduring features of WWII carceral infrastructure, promises of Indigenous land improvements, spaces of terror, moments of erasure, and for better or for worse, a medium to access the past. In this paper, I consider roads as archaeological features, and their enduring legacies from the past into uncertain futures. By focusing on roads as they intersect with memory and histories, rather than as peripheral lines of connection, roads emerge as contentious and often unresolved spaces.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Retelling Time in Indigenous-Colonial Interactions across North America

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50545