The Landscape of Prehistory: Mesa Verde and the Framing of the Past in American Archaeology

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project investigating how American archaeological work in the Southwest gradually elides ongoing acts of displacing native and Mexican peoples in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Some of the earliest American encounters with ruins and abandoned settlements belonging to Ancestral Puebloan civilizations occurred in the context of demarcating the new boundary between Mexico and the United States. For example, John Russell Bartlett’s Personal Narrative of the U.S.-Mexican Boundary Survey (1854) is noteworthy for the way such ruins are a major focus within it. However, Bartlett actively associates these ancient ruins with processes of forced removal that he can see happening right in front of him, which result in another, more recent kind of ruin. Over time, though, the recognition of a complex and often violent history of relocation that both shapes and continues into the present drops out of later archaeological work in the region. From the perspective of anachronism, this general change in how Southwest archaeology relates past and present involves superimposing a wished-for present, specifically one devoid of native inhabitants, onto the past ruin to the extent that that ruin is understood to be devoid of any relevance for contemporary indigenous peoples living in the region. Put another way, numerous critics of nineteenth-century European and American archaeological practice have pointed out how it “produces archaeological subjects by splitting contemporary non-European peoples off from their precolonial, and even their colonial past. To revive indigenous history and culture as archaeology is to revive them as dead” (Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 1992). This paper extends this critique further by exploring how such an operation is essentially a special form of anachronism and how it arises out of archaeological practices that, at least initially, are not.In particular, this paper tracks how this change in archaeological practice depends on a notion of prehistoric time which is developed by privileging certain kinds of archaeological evidence (especially pottery and architectural remains) and certain ways of presenting and interpreting that evidence, looking at the history of excavations at Mesa Verde at the turn of the century. Key texts include Gustaf Nordenskiöld’s Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde (1893), and Jesse Walter Fewkes’s Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park (1909 & 1911). In reinforcing the perception of Mesa Verde as a historically-disconnected, prehistoric site, Fewkes’s report differs from its forerunner in several aspects, specifically its consolidation of distinct structures (namely, how many there are and which are noteworthy), its shift from an analytical to a descriptive mode of writing, and finally its cultivation of a photographic aesthetic that bolsters the sense of a timeless ruin.