Conference Agenda

‘If the ancestors are gone, were you ever here? How could you prove to have a deep connection to this place?’ Destabilizing questions like these disrupt living communities’ claims to space, and have been leveraged to aid imperial exploitation. However, in considering processes of colonialism as that of “creative appropriation, manipulation, and transformation” (Dietler 2010: 10) — as well as being complex and continuous, including within our discipline – this paper examines the added layers of colonial harm that come with the removal of ancestral remains and cultural belongings from traditional homelands. In examining the role of identity as it relates to place, I argue that these concepts and processes of emptying have unintended consequences for archaeological practice and preservation laws, such as cultural resource management and the repatriation of Indigenous ancestral remains through NAGPRA.

From the establishment of the first New England praying towns, to the creation of the Federal Indian Reservation System, maps have been used by the State to delineate ‘Native’ and ‘non-Native’ spaces in North America. This paper engages with the ways in which modern maps of Indigenous communities can simultaneously reaffirm Native presence while also placing visual boundaries on where such presence exists. I interrogate how the geographic spaces outside of Federal Indian Reservations begin to be seen as ‘empty’ of Native presence and how this emptiness is often used as justification for the continued exploitation and disavowal of Indigenous communities. Drawing on my collaborative research with the Brothertown Indian Nation and their current efforts toward federal recognition - I further ask if and how cartographic methods can be repurposed as tools to push back against the validity of geographies that are ‘empty’ of Native presence.

Gratiot’s Grove, a mining settlement near current-day Shullsburg, Wisconsin, was founded in 1825 by Henry Gratiot and his brother. Henry was accompanied by Susan Hempstead Gratiot, his wife, and their six children, as well as two enslaved people. Susan, originally from Connecticut, frequently ran the household alone with Henry away on business. This paper uses an archaeological collection from the Gratiot homestead and archival documents from the Norlands Living History Center to examine Susan’s experiences of womanhood, domesticity, and isolation on the frontier. Susan’s letters describe feelings of loneliness and stress related to her obligations managing the household, particularly raising the children. However, she also mentions a community of women supporting her, all existing in different levels of (in)visibility, simultaneously present and absent in history. This paper considers the intricacies of Susan’s experiences in her home and community, as well as her own visibility both during and after her life.

The Huntington Anatomical Collection (1893-1921) is comprised of the remains of immigrants, migrants, and life-long city residents who died in New York City institutions and were subsequently dissected. This paper focuses on the causes-of-death inked on municipal death records. Many people--including youth and young adults--were reported to have died of phthsis (later known as tuberculosis), a wasting disease, and exhaustion. How might we think about exhaustion and “wasting” within the context of industrial capitalism--one that required the labor power of immigrants and migrants? In tying recorded causes of death to labor regimes, I draw from anthropologist Maura Finkelstein’s work on the worn-out, laboring body as a ruin, probing how such theorizations might shape historical archaeologies of capitalism and industrialism. I end by considering the ways that exhausted bodies--classified as “unproductive” by discourses on poverty and labor--were recommodified as cadavers and specimens, from which prestige and value was further extracted.

Gallops Island served as Boston’s harbor quarantine station during the turn of the 20^th century. In this paper, I consider the Gallops Island Quarantine Station at the intersection of public health and immigration infrastructures. Ideally, it would continually fill with ill patients plucked from their movements, to then empty healthy travelers back onto their paths. It was thus not a place that people ideally lived or dwelled, but was, rather, a designed place of emptiness. As the quarantine hospital worked to empty people of contagion, the very presence of contagion created/emptied the space for this to happen. Yet, while the quarantine station was made to “empty” a place through which people flow, the presence of human remains materially counters this emptiness, as over 200 people succumbed to contagion and were buried in the Gallops Island Quarantine Cemetery.

For almost 20 years, the Northern Pacific railroad infrastructure propelled the town of Winnipeg Junction, MN into a prosperous boomtown full of saloons, hotels, businesses, farms, churches and homes at the turn of the 20th century. But by 1910 the rail monopoly manipulated the fate of an entire town by moving its tracks, which resulted in a landscape that must have felt empty. Buildings were relocated, townspeople who lost their fight against the monopoly had moved on or dispersed, and only the building foundations were left. Yet the site is packed with the physical remnants of an early mass-production commodity and consumerist age. The excessive rubbish of capitalism literally filled in the empty foundations. Their recovery today reveals stories of toxicity and excess characteristic of the first Gilded Age. This paper discusses the materialities of emptiness at Winnipeg Junction and how residents navigated the empty promises of capitalism.

Refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, and recycle is a modern-day waste management mantra that would have likely resonated with people in the past. It does, however, ring empty given the scale and types of waste generated today. This point was hinted at by William Rathje, as the 20^th century drew to a close. His seminal work in garbology was primarily concerned with landscapes of waste, those places situated on the margins and seemingly devoid of life. In the early-21^st century, anthropocenic acceleration invites discussion of the wasted landscape. How does life emerge or become entangled in such places? Here I discuss my ethnoarchaeological investigations of recycling facilities in southern Florida. They are wasted landscapes, I argue, which engender new ways of living. These naturecultural entanglements yield equal parts hope and despair about present-day anthropocenic impacts and future outcomes for this planet and all that inhabit it.

We are living through an era defined by incredible quantities of waste. Even once it has been disposed of, waste does not disappear. The massive scale and persistence of industrial waste has transformed the air, water, and soil that we live on, and remade the very way we produce social life. Over the past two centuries, people have had to live alongside this ambivalent persistence of their own making. This paper is interested in how archaeology, a discipline that tends to view persistent waste as a trace for the purposes of historical reconstruction, can attend to the socio-ecological effects of this ambivalent persistence. Drawing from excavations of a 1930s mining community that lived downwind of lead tailings, this paper explores the theoretical potential of ‘tailings’ as a metaphor for the affective and effective afterlives of industrial waste: their biophysical harms, their ecological affordances, and the uncertainties they carry with them.

Emptiness is produced through avenues both discursive and material, and frequently through their entanglement. Discursive emptying relies on materialities and practices including surveillance, built space, and violence to empty places physically, as discourses elide and disavow the presences and claims of those that dwell within. However, tension exists between claims of emptiness, processes of emptying, and the persisting dwelling and presence of people, things and practices within these spaces that challenge and disrupt them. College campus smoke-free environments rely on such material-discursive emptying, while Foucault’s notion of heterotopia provides an entrance into their ambivalences by highlighting the tensions between “effectively enacted utopia” and the distortions of that reality provided by practices and materialities excluded that should not be present. This paper presents archaeological survey data that materializes these dynamics by demonstrating how “smoke-free” institutional discourse, policy and utopian branding on a college campus contains an otherwise incompatible heterotopic smokescape.