Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T07:17:39.889Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Occulting the past. Conceptualizing forgetting in the history and archaeology of Sylvester Manor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2011

Katherine Hayes
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the construction of social memory, history, identity and heritage. Through a focus on processes of forgetting, this discussion offers a new set of interpretations of early colonial Sylvester Manor, a 17th-century plantation site in coastal New York. More specifically, the construction of racial categories over several centuries implicates social memory and forgetting, and introduces issues to the manner in which we remember the site where people of European, African and Native American ancestry met. This analysis views memory and forgetting not only as historical vectors in racialization, but also as factors in current identity politics.

Keywords

memorycolonial New Yorkrace constructionUS slaveryNative Americansenslaved Africans
Type
Notes
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , December 2011 , pp. 197 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, D., 1982: Life, the universe and everything, London.Google Scholar
Agamben, G., 2009: The signature of all things. On method (D'Isanto, trans. L. and Attell, K.), New York.Google Scholar
Ales, M., 1979: A history of the Indians on Montauk, Long Island, in The History and archaeology of the Montauk Indians. Readings in Long Island archaeology and ethnohistory, Vol. 3, Stony Brook, 13–125.Google Scholar
Barsh, R., 2002: ‘Colored’ seamen in the New England whaling industry. An Afro-Indian consortium, in Brooks, J. (ed.), Confounding the color line. The Indian–black experience in North America, Lincoln, 76–107.Google Scholar
Battaglia, D., 1992: The body in the gift. Memory and forgetting in Sabarl mortuary exchange, American ethnologist 19, 3–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckles, H., 1990: A history of Barbados. From Amerindian settlement to nation-state, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bradley, R., 2002: The past in prehistoric societies, London.Google Scholar
Bragdon, K., 1996: Native people of southern New England, 1500–1650, Norman.Google Scholar
Buchli, V., and Lucas, G., 2001: Between remembering and forgetting, in Buchli, V. and Lucas, G. (eds), Archaeologies of the contemporary past, London, 79–83.Google Scholar
Campisi, J., 1991: The Mashpee Indians. Tribe on trial, Syracuse.Google Scholar
Campisi, J., 2003: Reflections on the last quarter century of tribal recognition, New England law review 37, 505–15.Google Scholar
Capone, P., and Preucel, R., 2002: Ceramic semiotics. Women, pottery, and social meanings at Kotyiti Pueblo, in Preucel, R. (ed.), Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt. Identity, meaning, and renewal in the Pueblo world, Albuquerque, 99–113.Google Scholar
Cipolla, C., 2008: Signs of identity, signs of memory, Archaeological dialogues 15, 196–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, B., 2005: Lived ethnicity. Archaeology and identity in Mexicano America, World archaeology, 440–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cole, J., 1998: The work of memory in Madagascar, American ethnologist 25, 610–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connerton, P., 1989: How societies remember, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connerton, P., 2008: Seven types of forgetting, Memory studies 1, 59–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connerton, P., 2009: How modernity forgets, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duvall, R., 1952: The history of Shelter Island, 1652–1932, Shelter Island Heights.Google Scholar
Ferme, M., 2001: The underneath of things. Violence, history, and the everyday in Sierra Leone, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Fernow, B. (ed.), 1881: Documents relating to the colonial history of the state of New York, Vol. 13, Albany.Google Scholar
Fernow, B. (ed.), 1883: Documents relating to the colonial history of the state of New York, Vol. 14, Albany.Google Scholar
Fogelson, R., 1989: The ethnohistory of events and nonevents, Ethnohistory 36, 133–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forbes, J., 1993: Africans and Native Americans. The language of race and the evolution of red-black peoples, Urbana.Google Scholar
Forty, A., 1999: Introduction, in Forty, A. and Küchler, S. (eds), The art of forgetting, Oxford, 1–18.Google Scholar
Gardener, L., 1897 (1660): Gardener's narrative. Written in Hampton, East, June 12, 1660, in History of the Pequot War. The contemporary accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardener (reprinted from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1897), Cleveland.Google Scholar
Garroutte, E., 2001: The racial formation of American Indians. Negotiating legitimate identities within tribal and federal law, American Indian quarterly 25, 224–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garroutte, E., 2003: Real Indians. Identity and survival of native America, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Gonzales, A., 2009: Racial legibility. The federal census and the (trans)formation of ‘Black’ and ‘Indian’ identity, 1790–1920, in Tayac, G. (ed.), IndiVisible. African–native lives in the Americas, Washington, DC, 57–67.Google Scholar
Goodby, R., 1998: Technological patterning and social boundaries. Ceramic variability in southern New England, A.D. 1000–1675, in Stark, M. (ed.), The archaeology of social boundaries, Washington, DC, 161–82.Google Scholar
Goodby, R., 2002: Reconsidering the Shantok tradition, in Kerber, J. (ed.), A lasting impression. Coastal, lithic, and ceramic research in New England archaeology, Westport, 141–54.Google Scholar
Gross, A., 2008: What blood won't tell. A history of race on trial in America, Cambridge, MA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Handsman, R., and Richmond, T., 1995: Confronting colonialism: the Mahican and Schaghticoke peoples and us, in Schmidt, P. and Patterson, T. (eds), Making alternative histories. The practice of archaeology and history in non-Western settings, Santa Fe, 87–17.Google Scholar
Harrison, S., 2004: Forgetful and memorious landscapes, Social anthropology 12, 135–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, K., 2007: Field excavations at Sylvester Manor, Northeast historical archaeology 36, 34–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, K., 2008: Race histories. Colonial pluralism and the production of history at the Sylvester Manor site, Shelter Island, New York, PhD dissertation, University of California–Berkeley.Google Scholar
Hayes, K., n.d.: Small beginnings. Experimental technologies and implications for hybridity, in Card, J. (ed.), Hybrid material culture. The archaeology of syncretism and ethnogenesis, Carbondale.Google Scholar
Johnson, E., 1999: Community and confederation. A political geography of Contact period southern New England, in Levine, M., Sassaman, K. and Nasseney, M. (eds), The archaeological Northeast, Westport, 155–68.Google Scholar
Johnson, M., 2008: Making history public. Indigenous claims to settler states, Public culture 20, 97–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, A., 2007: Memory and material culture, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joyce, R., 2004: Unintended consequences? Monumentality as a novel experience in formative Mesoamerica, Journal of archaeological method and theory 11, 5–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joyce, R., 2008: Ancient bodies, ancient lives. Sex, gender, and archaeology, New York.Google Scholar
Kenny, M., 1999: A place for memory. The interface between individual and collective history, Comparative studies in society and history 41, 420–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Küchler, S., 2002: Malanggan. Art, memory and sacrifice, Oxford.Google Scholar
Kuijt, I., 2008: The regeneration of life. Neolithic structures of symbolic remembering and forgetting, Current anthropology 49, 171–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lamb, M., 1887: The manor of Shelter Island, historic home of the Sylvesters, Magazine of American history 18, 361–89.Google Scholar
Lepore, J., 1998: The name of war. King Philip's war and the origins of American identity, New York.Google Scholar
Liebmann, M., 2008: The innovative materiality of revitalization movements. Lessons from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, American anthropologist 110, 360–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lightfoot, K., 1995: Culture contact studies. Redefining the relationship between prehistoric and historical archaeology, American antiquity 60, 199–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowenthal, D., 1993: Memory and oblivion, Museum management and curatorship 12, 171–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowenthal, D., 1996: Possessed by the past. The heritage crusade and the spoils of history, New York.Google Scholar
Lucas, G., 1997: Forgetting the past, Anthropology today 13, 8–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, G., 2004: Modern disturbances. On the ambiguities of archaeology, Modernism/modernity 11, 109–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDavid, C., 2004: From ‘traditional’ archaeology to public archaeology to community action. The Levi Jordan plantation project, in Shackel, P. and Chambers, E. (eds), Places in mind. Public archaeology as applied anthropology, New York, 35–56.Google Scholar
McKinney, T., 2006: Race and federal recognition in native New England, in Miles, T. and Holland, S. (eds), Crossing waters, crossing worlds. The African diaspora in Indian country, Durham, 57–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMullen, A., 2002: Blood and culture. Negotiating race in twentieth-century native New England, in Brooks, J. (ed.), Confounding the color line. The Indian–Black experience in North America, Lincoln, 261–91.Google Scholar
McMullen, A., 2004: ‘Canny about conflict’. Nativism, revitalization, and the invention of tradition in Native southeastern New England, in Harkin, M. (ed.), Reassessing revitalization movements. Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, Lincoln, 261–77.Google Scholar
Mallmann, J., 1990 (1899): Historical papers on Shelter Island and its Presbyterian church, Bowie, MD.Google Scholar
Mandell, D., 1996: Beyond the frontier. Indians in eighteenth-century eastern Massachusetts, Lincoln.Google Scholar
Mandell, D., 2003: ‘We, as a tribe, will rule ourselves’. Mashpee's struggle for autonomy, 1746–1840, in Calloway, C. and Salisbury, N. (eds), Reinterpreting New England Indians and the colonial experience, Boston, 299–340.Google Scholar
Mandell, D., 2008: Tribe, race, history. Native Americans in southern New England, 1780–1880, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Mathis, R., and Weik, T., 2005: Not just black and white. African Americans reclaiming the indigenous past, in Smith, C. and Wobst, H. (eds), Indigenous archaeologies. Decolonizing theory and practice, London, 281–97.Google Scholar
Meskell, L., 2004: Object worlds in ancient Egypt. Material biographies past and present, Oxford.Google Scholar
Mills, B., 2002: Acts of resistance: Zuni ceramics, social identity, and the Pueblo Revolt, in Preucel, R. (ed.), Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt. Identity, meaning, and renewal in the Pueblo world, Albuquerque, 85–98.Google Scholar
Mills, B., and Walker, W. (eds), 2008: Memory work. Archaeologies of material practices, Santa Fe.Google Scholar
Mrozowski, S., Hayes, K. and Hancock, A., 2007: The archaeology of Sylvester manor, Northeast historical archaeology 36, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullins, P., 2001: Racializing the parlor. Race and Victorian bric-a-brac consumption, in Orser, C. (ed.), Race and the archaeology of identity, Salt Lake City, 158–76.Google Scholar
Munn, N., 1986: The fame of gawa. A symbolic study of value transmission in Massim (Papua New Guinea) society, Durham.Google Scholar
Newell, M.E., 2003: The changing nature of Indian slavery in New England, 1670–1720, in Calloway, C. and Salisbury, N. (eds), Reinterpreting New England Indians and the colonial experience, Boston, 106–36.Google Scholar
O'Brien, J., 2010: Firsting and lasting. Writing Indians out of existence in New England, Minneapolis.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pascoe, P., 2009: What comes naturally. Miscegenation law and the making of race in America, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perdue, T., 2009: Native Americans, African Americans, and Jim Crow, in Tayac, G. (ed.), IndiVisible. African–Native lives in the Americas, Washington, DC, 21–33.Google Scholar
Plane, A.M., and Button, G., 1993: The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act. Ethical contest in historical context, Ethnohistory 40, 587–618.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Priddy, K., 2007: From Youghco to Black John. Ethnohistory of Sylvester manor, ca. 1600–1735, Northeast historical archaeology 36, 16–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pulsipher, D. (ed.), 1859: Records of the colony of New Plymouth in New England, Vol. 1 (1643–1651) and Vol. 2 (1653–1679), Boston.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, P., 2004: Memory, history, forgetting, Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rouse, I., 1947: Ceramic traditions and sequences in Connecticut, Bulletin of the archaeological society of Connecticut 21, 10–25.Google Scholar
Rowlands, M., 1993: The role of memory in the transmission of culture, World archaeology 25, 141–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rowlands, M., 1999: Remembering to forget: sublimation as sacrifice in war memorials, in Forty, A. and Küchler, S. (eds), The art of forgetting, Oxford, 129–45.Google Scholar
Rubertone, P., 2000: The historical archaeology of Native Americans, Annual review of anthropology 29, 425–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saitta, D., 2007: The archaeology of collective action, Gainesville.Google Scholar
Shackel, P., 2000: Archaeology and created memory. Public history in a national park, New York.Google Scholar
Shackel, P., 2001: Public memory and the search for power in American historical archaeology, American anthropologist 103, 655–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shackel, P., 2008: Memory studies in historical archaeology. SAA archaeological record 8, 10–12.Google Scholar
Silliman, S., 2009: Change and continuity, practice and memory. Native American persistence in colonial New England, American antiquity 74, 211–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sofaer-Derevenski, J. (ed.), 2000: Children and material culture, London.Google Scholar
Strong, J., 2001: The Montaukett Indians of eastern Long Island, Syracuse.Google Scholar
Tarlow, S., 1999: Bereavement and commemoration. An archaeology of mortality, Oxford.Google Scholar
Trouillot, M., 1995: Silencing the past. Power and the production of history, Boston.Google Scholar
Van Dyke, R., and Alcock, S. (eds), 2003: Archaeologies of memory, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Voss, B., 2005: The archaeology of overseas Chinese communities, World archaeology 37, 424–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Voss, B., 2008: The archaeology of ethnogenesis. Race and sexuality in colonial San Francisco, Berkeley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weik, T., 1997: The archaeology of Maroon societies in the Americas. Resistance, cultural continuity, and transformation in the African diaspora, Historical archaeology 31, 81–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, B., 1997: Forgetting your dead. Alienable and inalienable objects in northwest Tanzania, Anthropological quarterly 70, 164–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, R., 1991: The middle ground. Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650–1815, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkie, L., 2003: The archaeology of mothering. An African-American midwife's tale, London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, H., 2006: Death and memory in early medieval Britain, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witgen, M., 2007: The rituals of possession: Native identity and the invention of empire in seventeenth-century western North America, Ethnohistory 54, 639–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolf, E., 1982: Europe and the people without history, Berkeley.Google Scholar