Katherine Hayes on "Archaeology, Preservation, and Public Memory: Challenging the Settler Narrative at Historic Fort Snelling"

6pm, Thursday, March 14, 2019  in the John B. Davis Lecture Hall in the Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center at Macalester College (also #29 on this map)

Archaeology undertaken in service of preservation in the 20th century often reflected the values of the time.  At Historic Fort Snelling, archaeology served to bolster a distinctly non-inclusive narrative of American enterprise at the frontier and the triumph of settler rugged individualism. Yet the excavated remains do still hold remnants of other stories at odds with that narrative.  In this talk I discuss some of the current efforts to use artifact collections and absent landscapes to bring greater public attention to these other stories,  how the reconstructed Fort complicates those efforts, and how digital space (e.g. virtual reality and augmented reality) might contribute to our goals.

This event is free and open to the public; co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department at Macalester College and the Archaeological Institute of America.

About the Speaker: Katherine Hayes is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. More info about her work is here.

AIA members may join Professor Hayes for a no-host lunch at Pad Thai on Grand after the talk.

a pdf flyer for this talk is located here