Overcoming the Silence: Race, Archaeology, and Memory

ABSTRACT

Economic and racial inequalities impact how sites are or are not recognized as having the attributes necessary to meet the criteria for historical preservation and commemoration, either under private standards or federal law. As a result, past forms of structural racism impact our perception and treatment of historical people in the present, engendering historical silences and impacting which people we remember. This article considers both government and private standards for historic preservation and commemoration in addition to analyzing the practice of historic commemoration on some private Virginia historic sites. Through this dual discussion, I examine how practices governing the preservation of archaeological sites continue to marginalize in the present those whom US society marginalized in the past. Since these practices help determine what constitutes historically significant parts of the American past and what we commemorate, they promote disparity in determining whose history we remember and preserve.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• memory
• heritage
• cultural resource management
• preservation
• marginalization

Acknowledgments

My special thanks to Esther White, Eleanor Breen, and Luke Pecoraro for their help and collaboration with my work at Mount Vernon and for encouraging me to examine the Library Site and archaeological preservation practices. My thanks to Jeffery Martin and anonymous reviewers for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington for helping provide funding that I used to carry out this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rebecca Schumann is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on the relationship between law, race, identity, and agency in free African American communities from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. Her dissertation research examines potential free African American households from the early nineteenth century at Mount Vernon. She also investigates how past forms of economic and racial marginalization continue to impact present-day historic preservation efforts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding through both Fred W. Smith Library for the Study of George Washington and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Any views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Fred W. Smith Library or the University of Illinois.