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---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.msu.edu> Date: Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 1:50 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-AmIndian]: Bilodeau on Hunter, 'The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America's Indigenous Past' To: <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Doug Hunter. The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America's Indigenous Past. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 344 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-3440-1. Reviewed by Christopher Bilodeau (Dickinson College) Published on H-AmIndian (November, 2018) Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe Marking History Douglas Hunter has written a book on what some have claimed is "'the most frequently documented artifact in American archaeology'": Dighton Rock (p. 2). Named after the town in Massachusetts, the rock was carved with numerous inscriptions or markings that probably date to a time before extended European contact. Just who carved them and what they mean are not self-evident, and numerous interpretations have been made over the centuries as to their origins. It is these interpretations, almost all from Europeans colonists or white Americans, that have so captivated Hunter, and he has written a work that captivates readers, or at least this reader, as well. The rock's indigenous origins have been at times questioned (most times, actually), and at other times supported. Hunter believes the markings' origins are more than likely indigenous, probably Wampanoag, but his take is only the latest in a long and almost laughably large number of differing interpretations about the rock, most of them against a "pure" indigenous interpretation of its creation. "Dighton Rock has been a mirror that reflects the prejudices and ignorance of everyone who has preferred not to see what is actually here," he writes, and it has been used "in advancing and justifying colonization and conceptualizing hierarchies of humanity" (pp. 4, 5). So for Hunter, the rock and its meanings are secondary and probably unknowable. But his story focuses on how amateur and scholarly discourses that stem from archaeology, biology, and cultural theories about those subjects were used over time to disenfranchise Indians, erase their history, and remove them from their lands. As noted, the narratives about the rock are strikingly diverse. Its inscriptions--Hunter prefers the term "markings," making their meaning more ambiguous--have been attributed to various peoples from a remarkable number of areas. Scholars and amateurs have invoked Norsemen, Phoenicians, pirates, the lost Tribe of Israel, Egyptians, and even people from Atlantis in their accounts of Dighton Rock's origins, and these explanations are only some of the many that have jostled with an indigenous-origins story. In the absence of an indigenous interpretation of the rock's meaning, Hunter has taken on a history of the perspectives of all European Americans who have tried to use Dighton Rock for their own purposes, "in a never-ending act of cultural ventriloquism" (p. 6). No straight indigenous reading of the rock is available, he notes, and in any account petroglyphs in general are not a "message" to be decoded. That ambiguity--Hunter invokes Mary B. Black's term "percept ambiguity" in dealing with these kinds of artifacts[1]--meant that the meanings of the rock are not subject to precise or permanent interpretations, and probably were not even public messages but were personal creations with equally personal meanings to its creator or creators. Hunter argues that the variety of interpretations of the rock have tended to fall within three major categories, all of which touch on the people who inhabited the region, before and after colonization: belonging, possession, and dispossession. Each one has complicated backgrounds and stories. To whom does the rock belong? If one was able to possess the rock, then one could control its interpretation and use. Colonization would be crucial to the dispossession and control of that meaning. By the twentieth century, the legal possession of the rock was the most important factor in the interpretation of the markings, and dispossession, the operative idea of colonization, used violence, coercion, undermining or reneging on treaties, and erasure of native claims and culture to possess the rock. To elucidate these arguments, Hunter uses a number of neologisms to analyze how groups dispossessed natives of their lands and culture and then claimed the rock as their own. He uses the term "White Tribalism" to denote moments when "theorists turned Indigenous peoples in whom they detected intellectual and cultural capabilities into whites, or at least into Indigenous peoples who must have been improved in the past by the superior cultures, technologies, and blood of Europeans" (p. 10). For example, a substantial discourse about native populations in North America during the eighteenth century rested on what Hunter calls the "multiple-migration displacement scenario," or the idea that more advanced people came first, then less advanced ones took over. This allowed whites to recognize the potentially "civilized" or "advanced" aspects of some native peoples but to attribute it not to the natives themselves but to a superior but now removed population. Under such a scenario the markings on Dighton Rock were the product of a more advanced, non-indigenous group, but one that had succumbed to the less advanced native population, and that narrative helped justify Indian displacement by white Europeans. Monogenism (descended all from one group) or polygenism (multiple groups descending from multiple ancestors) were also used in flexible ways within this narrative about the rock, as were migrationism (the movement of populations) and diffusionism (the movement of culture). But in all these narratives the outcome remained the same: that natives did not have a right to the land and were dispossessed. In that sense, Dighton Rock was lumped with other native artifacts, such as mounds that were found throughout North America, and archaeology and its practitioners "militarized" these artifacts and discourses for the colonial project. Even the Freemasons indulged in this kind of argument, as they emphasized the fact that Indians had been exposed to great civilizations but never had the talent or prospects to actually do anything with them. Other narratives about the rock arose in the nineteenth century, but all continued along the lines of dispossession. One important one was (in another of Hunter's neologisms) "Transatlantic Gothicism," or the belief in the white destiny to remove and transplant the region's native peoples. The Connecticut theologian and scholar Ezra Stiles argued this point already in the middle of the eighteenth century, but this narrative would become especially sharp in the nineteenth, the century of "manifest destiny." The ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft attempted to connect his vision of Protestantism and science through his work with the Indians, and, in his interpretation of the rock, blended his own ever-shifting positions (he ultimately decided that the rock was of indigenous origin, and some late nineteenth-century scholars and thinkers agreed with him) within broader migrationist discourses that permeated that period. Indians could claim the markings, many thought, but only within a narrative of their own inferiority to whites. One variant on this theme occurred when authors began to ponder narratives of Vinland and Icelandic sagas and connect them to the history of southern New England. This Scandinavian interpretation became especially prominent in the late nineteenth century, so much so that plans were made to dig up the rock and transport it to Boston, attributing it to the Vikings and Leif Eriksson. The plan foundered, but the outlines of "Transatlantic Gothicism" remained distinct. Finally, in the early twentieth century, a Brown University psychology professor named Edmund Burke Delabarre deciphered the date "1511" on the rock and claimed that it was made by the Portuguese explorer Miguel Corte-Real. This interpretation was (and remains) generally embraced by the substantial Portuguese population in southern New England (although not everyone is so sure). Delabarre claimed that Corte-Real colonized the Indians and created a mixed tribe that was superior to simply native people--an intersection of "White Tribalism" and the "multiple-migration displacement scenario." In doing so, Delabarre explicitly erased the natives from their own history, attributing all of the "good" to the Europeans that came over. In that sense, the major thrust of Hunter's book is that "Dighton Rock's interpretations have been a tour de force of colonization" (p. 18). As the reader can get a sense, Hunter's text is erudite, thoughtful, and perspicacious, even as the narrative remains complicated. His analysis of the various discourses that surround Dighton Rock tend to rely on his neologisms, and he runs the risk of having too many (I have not elucidated on all of them here). I found myself having to write down a crib sheet of them as I read along, to make sure I understood the meaning of a statement or paragraph in which he used a neologism that he had defined several chapters before, and at times that detracted from the flow of the writing, which tends toward lucidity and clarity. But overall, historians, historical and social anthropologists, and archaeologists could all use this well-written and readable text in their undergraduate and graduate classrooms to highlight how scholars formulate the theories about other peoples, the importance of broader contexts on their formulation, and the potentially problematic historical outcomes to that work. Note [1]. Mary B. Black, "Ojibwa Taxonomy and Percept Ambiguity," _Ethos_ 5, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 90-118. Citation: Christopher Bilodeau. Review of Hunter, Doug, _The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America's Indigenous Past_. H-AmIndian, H-Net Reviews. November, 2018. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51729 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
