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Counter-monuments and the Perdurance of Place

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2018

Christopher M. Watts
Christopher M. Watts*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology|PAS 2010, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ONT N2L 3G1, Canada Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, I critically examine contemporary commemorative forms and practices known as ‘counter-monuments’ from an archaeological standpoint, in the process interrogating the conceptual underpinnings of the monument taxon as it is currently understood. Drawing on Tim Ingold's notion of perdurance, and through an exploration of counter-monumental concerns with form, siting and proxemics, I argue that memorialization can be seen as relationally emergent in the experiences of particular places. This claim is advanced through a discussion of the Cedar Creek Earthworks, a Woodland Period (c. 1–1550 ad) enclosure near Windsor, Canada, whose status as a monument can be understood, not as an ostentatious appeal to past events, but as a magnet for drawing out and assembling human and non-human relations in place.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 379 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2018 

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