Landscapes of forgetting and structural silence in the American Southeast

Archaeological studies of memory have shown how the past is continually resurrected through selective practices of remembrance. Strategies of social amnesia have received less attention, however. The US southeast provides a useful vantage point for exploring how landscape and the built environment l...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American anthropologist 2022-03, Vol.124 (1), p.90-103
Main Author: Cobb, Charles R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amnesia
Archaeology
Built environment
Colonialism
European cultural groups
Landscape
landscapes
Memory
Memory disorders
Mississippian
platform mounds
plazas
Remembrance
social forgetting
Time
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Summary:Archaeological studies of memory have shown how the past is continually resurrected through selective practices of remembrance. Strategies of social amnesia have received less attention, however. The US southeast provides a useful vantage point for exploring how landscape and the built environment legislated acts of forgetting at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Whereas platform mounds and plazas mediated tensions between remembrance and erasure within communities prior to the arrival of Europeans, later colonial encroachments on Indigenous lands led to the increasing importance of these features as anchors of memory. This shifting, topological record embodied heterogenous, disjunctive framings of temporality. Resumen Estudios arqueológicos de memoria han mostrado cómo el pasado es resurrecto continuamente a través de prácticas selectivas de remembranza. Sin embargo, estrategias de amnesia social han recibido menos atención. El sureste americano provee una posición que da una perspectiva útil para explorar cómo el paisaje y el ambiente construido legislaron actos de olvido a escalas múltiples, espaciales y temporales. Mientras montículos de plataformas y plazas mediaron las tensiones entre remembranza y olvido dentro de las comunidades anteriores al arribo de los europeos, las invasiones coloniales posteriores en las tierras indígenas llevaron a la creciente importancia de estas características como anclas de la memoria. Este registro topológico cambiante corporeizó marcos heterogéneos, disyuntivos de temporalidad. [paisajes, olvido social, montículos de plataformas, plazas, de Mississippi]
ISSN:0002-7294
1548-1433
DOI:10.1111/aman.13697