The place of stone : Dighton Rock and the erasure of America's indigenous past

Book

The place of stone : Dighton Rock and the erasure of America's indigenous past / Douglas Hunter.

Hunter, Doug, 1959- (author.).

Summary:

"Claimed by many to be the most frequently documented artifact in American archeology, Dighton Rock is a forty-ton boulder covered in petroglyphs in southern Massachusetts. First noted by New England colonists in 1680, the rock's markings have been debated endlessly by scholars and everyday people alike on both sides of the Atlantic. The glyphs have been erroneously assigned to an array of non-Indigenous cultures: Norsemen, Egyptians, Lost Tribes of Israel, vanished Portuguese explorers, and even a prince from Atlantis. Douglas Hunter uses Dighton Rock to reveal the long, complex history of colonization, American archaeology, and the conceptualization of Indigenous people. Hunter argues that misinterpretations of the rock's markings share common motivations and have erased Indigenous people not only from their own history but from the landscape. He shows how Dighton Rock for centuries drove ideas about the original peopling of the Americas, including Bering Strait migration scenarios and the identity of the 'Mound Builders.' He argues the debates over Dighton Rock have served to answer two questions: Who belongs in America, and to whom does America belong?"--Provided by publisher.

Record details

ISBN: 9781469634401
ISBN: 1469634406
Physical Description: 324 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm
Publisher: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017]

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-308) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: A lost Portuguese explorer's American boulder -- First impressions and first arrivals: colonists encounter Dighton Rock -- Altogether ignorant: denying an indigenous provenance and constructing gothicism -- Multiple migrations: esotericism, Beringia, and Native Americans as Tartar hordes -- Stones of power: Edward Augustus Kendall's esoteric case for Dighton Rock's indigeneity -- Colonization's new epistemology: American archaeology and the road to the Trail of Tears -- Vinland imagined: the Norsemen and the gothicists claim Dighton Rock -- Shingwauk's reading: Dighton Rock and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's troubled ethnology -- Reversing Dighton Rock's polarity: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the American Ethnological Society, and the Grave Creek Stone -- Meaningless scribblings: Edmund Burke Delabarre, lazy Indians, and the Corte-Real theory -- American place-making: Dighton Rock as a Portuguese relic -- The stone's place: Dighton Rock Museum and narratives of power.