Black History as Property A Horizon of African American Memorialization Christopher N. Matthews Center for Public Archaeology Department of Anthropology Hofstra University

Post Civil Rights Cory Booker Deval Patrick Artur Davis

History and Property Scafidi: –Property is, in essence, a social system Carman: –Property is theft –Value only accrues to things that is some sense, and in some way, owned

Alexander CrummellFrederick Douglass History and Memory

While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

Contraband and Freedmen’s Cemetery site, Alexandria, VA

Contraband and Freedmen’s Cemetery site 1927 aerial photograph

Winning designs for Cemetery Memorial

King Manor and Rufus King

1936 Images of Civil War Memorial at King Manor

They disrespected our ancestors when they excavated our bones, they disrespected us when they took them out of the ground, and now they're disrespecting us by turning our grave site into some kind of a museum. Charles Barron, New York City Council

Our earth is full of skeletons New York African Burial Ground Prestwich Street, Cape Town

To Give the Past Back to the People “In order to give the past back, it must first of all be yours to give. In the second place, it implies a conception of ‘the people’, who stand in a separate relationship to both the givers of the past and ‘the past’ itself. In the third place, it raises the question of the format in which the past is to be returned –[i.e. texts, bones, that represent the past] Nick Shepherd “What Does it Mean to the Give the Past Back to the People?

Archaeologizing” the remains –Eliding ethics and disciplinary history –Compare to Chakrabarty’s anthropologizing Translating remains as the subject of history through what skeletal and archaeological analyses can speak about (vs. their use in other symbolic ways and metaphorical uses of the past) Translating the making of these stories as expertise, giving archaeologists, whose stake is assumed valid, authority in the form of their access, opinions and reports

Alternative archaeologies NYC Responsibility and descendancy

Alternative archaeologies Prestwich “Time for the dead”

History on the Line – Hodge Timelines are interdisciplinary and ubiquitous. Their superficial simplicity makes them a popular method of mediating engagement with the past and distilling complex processes for public consumption A timeline is a pedagogical prop, rationalizing a history through an apparently linear, knowable, and inevitable series of moments. Elision, ambiguity, multiplicity are all sublimated

Davis Square alternatives Graffiti

Stonehenge timeline 3100 BC no henge, causewayed enclosure BC first henge: simple circular ditch, burial site, part of the existing settlement space BC abandonment BC henge rebuilt in stone, added to in about 5 stages 1600 BC abandonment Roman and Medieval era: came to mark the edge of the wilderness, associated with Witches Christian era: Devil “malignant part of a Christian iconography” Early modern era: appropriated by secular nationalism, invention of Druidic builders “Apostles of freedom” Present: National heritage site and preservation commodity: –“Focus on monuments, on things, rather than ways of life or social practice; on origins rather than historical process…” (Bender) –Frozen past and bona fide tourists (25 minute dwell time) vs. druids or free festivalers

Stonehenge as “History”

Babbacombe Model Village

Occupation and the Poetics of Place Hayden, The Power of Place The story of cities and urban landscapes is tied to the conflicts between the making of space and its multiple signification as place Hayden ties place-making to memory-making through poetics and art creating an inclusive “cultural citizenship” reflected in the making and occupation of landscapes that bear the traces and scars of time

What is a sense of place? How is it created? How does this change?

Occupation of space – creating a sense of place Dwelling (Heidegger: being-in-the-world ) Buildings and neighborhood Work Transportation Shopping Leisure Identity: race, gender, class, sexuality, Process: marginalization, segregation, removal, isolation, resistance Counter-space: graffiti

Cognitive Maps

White landscape in colonial Virginia: articulated and processional “… rooms in the house, the house itself, the outbuildings, the church with its interior pews and surrounding walled courtyard, the courthouse and its walled courtyard … linked by roads that functioned as the setting for community interactions that worked together to embody the community as a whole” (Upton p.66) Black landscape: static and discrete –Moving from one point to another in discontinuous and concrete fashion “keep to the right hand path, then you’ll come to an old field, you are to cross that, and the you’ll come to the fence of such a one’s plantation, then keep to that fence, and you’ll come to a road that has three forks... Then you’ll come to a creek, after you cross that creek you must turn to the left, and you’ll come to a tobacco house …”

Place Memory Edward Casey: –“It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container experience that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memoriability … we might even say that memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported” More simply: –Places make stories because stories make places

What is Public about Public Art? or Public History? or Public Archaeology?