Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget: Materiality Confronts Public Memory in the Missouri Ozarks

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Our research in the Ozarks of southwest Missouri yields insights that are at odds with national and local perceptions of the area. Archaeological, documentary, and oral history data show that late 19th and early 20th century communities were more racially diverse and economies less narrowly agrarian than assumed and, arguably, than they are today. In this presentation, we explore how various media and material settings communicate local histories. We argue that the local histories largely reflect, reproduce, and reinforce the dominant narrative of a homogeneous, white, agrarian past. Both conscious elision (remembering to forget) and unquestioning acceptance (forgetting to remember) shape this exclusionary public memory. However, local descendants, activists, scholars, and sites managed by non-local entities (e.g., state parks) have begun to produce counter narratives. We argue that a critical analysis of exclusionary local histories and of the ongoing resistance to changing the loci that reproduce those histories is necessary for a more inclusive public discourse about the past. Using our own work, we examine how historical archaeology can help accomplish these aims and contribute to efforts by descendant communities and others to re-imagine and re-present the past of SW Missouri and the broader Ozarks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53700