Landscapes of forgetting and structural silence in the American Southeast

Abstract

AbstractArchaeological 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.