Archaeologies of Placemaking is the outcome of a WAC-5 session at Washington, D.C. in 2003. The following review of this volume is divided into two parts. The first part provides a summary of the nine chapters, and the second offers critical commentary on its content.
Archaeologies of Placemaking contains an introduction and eight case studies written by different contributors. Overall, these nine chapters share a concern with the authenticity of place histories, with a deeper focus on memory-work, and its material manifestation in monuments. The concept of place that the authors present is one of diverse meanings, which are ascribed by different communities, and manifested in practices of remembrance and materialisation. The European-American voice, which tends to envelop place, has emerged out of a broader discussion that is colonial in character. While in some cases these narratives have negatively portrayed Native American places, others have identified the significance of place in terms of the symbolic and ritual associated with Native American culture and history. This volume largely takes issue with the dominant European-American voice in site-specific cases that detail the ways that these places have been created, reified and communicated the Native American voices. As the contributors illustrate, the meaning of place has several interpretations; these multiple, and often conflicting interpretations create tensions between those communities with a vested interest in a place. One of the volume’s intentions is to resolve these tensions. Rather than hold them as a productive force, the discussions aim to create a balance or harmony between the different associations that Native Americans and European-Americans have with the same places.

Part I
Archaeologies of Placemaking will be of great interest to historic preservationists and heritage managers, as well as to archaeologists who are interested in following the way in which multiple interpretations of places have been documented. However, the specific North American histories and geographies of the case studies, as well as their theoretical position, make the volume quite specific in outlook and scope.
The volume opens with an introduction (Chapter One), and follows with four sections that compose its structure: senses of place, senses of history (Chapters Two and Three); placemaking and reinvented pasts (Chapters Four and Five); colonial monuments, indigenous memory keeping (Six and Seven); monuments, public celebrations, and community engagement (Eight and Nine). The geographic spread of the eight case studies are confined to North America, ranging from California to Virginia and from the Southwest to New England and the Canadian Maritimes. As the editor, Rubertone, notes, these chapters “raise critical questions about the very complicated and uncertain intersections of history and memory, place and displacement, public spectacle and private engagement, and reconciliation and reappropriation that resonate loudly all across the Indigenous world” (p. 16).
Chapter Two concerns the efforts to protect and present places associated with Mi’Kmaw identity in Debery and Belmont, Novia Scotia, Canada. The authors, Julien, Bernard, and Rosenmeier, highlight the difficulties in separating the past from the present as are often constructed in the linear temporalities (from 11,000 years ago according to c14 dating) that archaeologists write in their narratives. These, they argue, are devoid of the important emotional and spiritual connections that exist to a place regardless of their antiquity. This is highlighted by the title of the paper Paleo is not our word.
In Chapter Three, Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Ferguson, and Anyon discuss the Reeve Ruin and Davis sites in San Pedro Valley, Arizona and community identities over 13,000 years associated with the Pueblo, Hopi, Zuni, Western Apache and Tohono O’odham. It is argued that by appreciating the complexity of their contested histories it is possible to create an archaeologically-sensitive narrative that accommodates the senses of belonging that groups have to particular places. This is connected to a temporality which considers the ways in which these attachments might endure in an archaeology that does not arrest it diachronically.
Chapter Four examines the way in which Edgar Lee Hewett combined archaeological research with historic preservation in creating a distinctive New Mexican identity. Investigating the issue of invention, Preucel and Matero, suggest that the Coronado State Monument resolves the tensions and contradictions between the Pueblo people, the historical event of the Coronado entrada and its status as a monument. Highlighting the selective qualities of presenting history to reinforce the emerging political and cultural ‘hegemonies’ of the present day, the authors suggest that Hewett, in the early twentieth century, inadvertently produced an example of Foucault’s heterotopia (1986): a place containing simultaneous ironies in ‘represented, contested and inverted’ histories. Another, but not final irony also exists: while the site was reconstructed on a site without archaeological evidence, the importance of the place and its reconstruction serves as both an authentic and a contrived memory for the Pueblo and New Mexican identities. This nonetheless maintains its cultural and historical significance by being subject to further interpretations, one of which is presented in this book.
Chapter Five follows the sequences of meanings embedded at Fort Apache in terms of its life history or biography. Welch follows the life history process of Fort Apache (from 1870) from its Apache name Tl’óghagaii (before 1870) to its sedimentation as the White Mountain Apache tribe cultural center and historic park. The chapter goes on to examine the ways in which tensions, as well as their resolutions, interact with one another in the remembrance of the cultures involved in their production.
In Chapter Six, White attends to the Timbisha Shoshone presence in Death Valley and their history, which involved disputes over land ownership from the late nineteenth century to their forced relocation by European Americans in 1933. Rather than looking at the places of commemoration, this chapter focuses on the visible sites of resistance, as a way in which the Timbisha Shoshone have been remembered.
In Chapter Seven, Handsman examines the ‘monumented’ landscape in the Wampanoag Indian Country of southeastern Massachusetts, not from a perspective of specific places, but rather from its locales (sites of activity) where quotidian tasks were performed. As a consequence of this orientation, place is not presented as such. Rather, the ways in which colonial histories were and are entangled with Native American histories made conspicuous by archaeology (itself a result of quotidian tasks – to add as Ingold suggests, ‘the practice of archaeology is itself a form of dwelling’ (1993: 152)), and by written accounts of the Pilgrims’ experiences in the seventeenth century are emphasized.
Chapter Eight presents the history of two memorials raised by European Americans to the memory of the Narragansetts following their detribalization: Memorial Rock and the Canonicus Monument. Here, Rubertone elaborates further on the complex histories associated with community survival, cultural persistence and change, and resistant accommodations. Rubertone also raises an interesting paradox concerning the Narrangansett people, and presumably other extant indigenous communities, who continue to “struggle with the memorialisation of their own extinction” (p. 212-4). Such a paradox leads one to question the underlying authenticity concerning the sense of place one often associates with memorial sites of living populations.
Finally, in Chapter Nine, Hantman focuses on the Jamestown and the understanding of its 400th anniversary, which was embroiled in the Nationalistic narratives which enshroud it, but often contradicted by archaeological and environmental evidence. The chapter details the way in which Jamestown has been ‘sanctified, simply noted (designated), or obliterated’ in comparing the 1907 with the 2007 commemorations.

Part II
I am not a specialist in Native North American archaeology. Therefore it is not my intention to comment at length on the individual case studies within this volume. My own archaeology is focused on the research and theoretical focus related to landscape and placemaking in Iceland, particularly concerning the colonization of a landscape in the ninth century AD devoid of any previous cultural history. From here, I am concerned with the way by which societal structures are gradually formed and developed over time. I am also interested in an archaeology of movement (from place to place) and the way in which residual forms continue to structure and anchor movement over time. I use this second part of the review to address what I believe are some fundamental theoretical flaws in the volume. The fact that they are present from the onset of Archaeologies of Placemaking, undermines the value and overall impact that this study has on the archaeology of place. The volume misses an orienting theoretical discussion on the following important and foundational questions:
* What constitutes place’s involvement in archaeology?
* What are the varying responses of the ‘other’ multiple and less dominant voices; is this a ‘universal’ voice?
* Why is place portrayed as creating a distance between past and present? Would a closer temporal resolution of place challenge this assertion?
First, a general point. There are already several books on the topic of place: among them we may list Steven Feld and Keith Basso’s (eds.) Senses of place (1996), Edward Casey’s Getting back into place (1993) and The fate of place (1998), Tim Creswell’s Place. A short introduction (2004), and Yi-Fi Tuan’s Space and place: the perspectives of experience (1977). One could argue that the debates on place in Archaeologies of Placemaking are already well-situated, and therefore do not need further discussion at this level. Unfortunately place is one of those slippery and ambiguous terms which needs clarification by being situated within its specific discourse, or, in this instance, sets of case studies (cf. Tilley 2004: 24-6). While there is a certain amount of ambiguity as to what is meant by ‘place’, which reveals a greater openness and fluidity than is often present in other books — I am unsure if this was fully intended. Whatever the reason, the fact that the concept of place is thoroughly under-theorized leaves some serious gaps. Furthermore, it is hard to give credence to a position and a theoretical argument which seeks a dialectical ‘middle’ position (Olsen 2003; 2007). What follows is a short commentary on some aspects that I think would have benefited the book: an alternative concept of place; the relationalities and multiplicities of place; a critique on the value of ‘middle ground’; and the use of time and memory.
Contrary to overall current of the book, place is not a bounded and fixed entity in either space or time. Place, to the contrary, exists in a continual state of alteration and perpetual transformation (Massey 1993). One could say that it is in a constant state of becoming. Place is a bundle of relations, locales or sites where – metaphorically – things become sticky, slow down and become stuck. These relations are not fixed; they are decidedly slower in the movements that pass through them. Places are paradoxically hyperactive while being materially located. Part of its character is because place is recursively constituted – or made by people – who perform and engage with the physicality and material presence of place, giving it its identity, and, in the process, becoming also identified by it. As Casey reminds us, place is the same as self: there is no place without self; and there is no self with place (2001: 206). Places not only are, they happen and are as mutable as the people who make them.
What I mean is that the ‘real’ character of place is not seen or experienced from the outside, as many of the case studies have emphasized in their tendency to define place from privileged positions. Place is constituted through the involvement and engagements that take place on the inside; definition of exterior and interior is relative, but in the sense of Casey’s suggestion, place is part of the self identity in such a way that it cannot be separated, or perhaps even established in the first instance, unless one already has the sense of attachment. In this way, the book focuses on presenting the external and internal relations to place as a divided notion, each making its investment towards a single proposition of the place, pitted one against the other. This is not to say that one can have a single proposition or perspective on place, but only that ‘real’ places need to be experienced, but that also one needs to be ready to become involved: as Basso reminds us in this sense that he was not ready to visit particular sites as one had to wise to them, expressing the sense of ‘wisdom sits in places’ (1996).
In this book, place should have retained more of its experienced qualities that engagement with any kind of people and their things provides. This arguably would have retained the multiple tensions that go hand in hand with the many collisions which are all in constant motion in providing unique perspectives of place. All of the bodies or participants involved in placemaking bring with them particular causes and means that articulate their own attachments and meanings in places’ construction and in the construction of themselves. In this respect, much more emphasis to the actual voices could have been given to the Native American communities involved, for example. To be fair, a few chapters do present this sense, such as Chapter Four and Chapter Eight, but the majority fall short. The inclusion of a broader scope of Native American voices alone would have given more emphasis to the idea that places resonate to the condition and fabric brought by the individuals and collectives that contextualize them.
Place is also used in many different ways in the book, and comes across as something that can denote a monument, a landscape, space, or locale. This elasticity to the notion of place reduces the specificity of what place is. It can mean all of these things, but it needs clarification and more argument, and most importantly consistency in the way that it is used. Part of this meandering arises because there is more of a focus in some chapters on the history of place rather than its archaeology per se. This results in the archaeologies of placemaking being lost to its histories (e.g. Chapter Six). What appears in the book is a rather more universal and holistic usage of place that both disrupts and unites it with space and landscape (Cresswell 2004: 10). An archaeology of placemaking, rather than establishing itself in terms of the history of things done at a place, should perhaps have considered place as a result of its relational qualities; in effect to decenter it and instead focus on the relations that circulate, rather than on the place, or thing, itself. These are places revealed through practices and meanings, which is a reminder of the activities that occurred (c.f. Thomas 2001: 172-4). As a result, issues of residuality, resilience and endurance relating to place establish a coherent archaeological framework on which to hang other concerns (Lucas 2008).
This brings me to my third point concerning the issue of ‘middle ground’. Place, it is stated in the opening chapter, is personal and political, and does not necessarily require special skills in its making (p. 13). This is a fair statement, which is further elaborated by the suggestion that places lurk everywhere and are produced by everyone, and in their making are never made by simple processes. But … if they are created by everyone, which is a perspective I agree with and would have liked to have see more of in the book, how is a ‘middle ground’ maintained or even produced without it being contrived? I find this usage / juxtaposition more than a little inconsistent and flawed.
While the meanings of place are always in some way negotiated (both at a personal and collective level) there is a problem in creating single propositions. For example, the introduction argues that the idea of ‘middle ground’ does not involve a notion of compromise (p. 16). I find this position to be a bit naïve (p. 16), particularly because place is constituted by the violence involved in its production, which is always, to some degree, contested (González-Ruibal 2006). Not acknowledging the conflict by suggesting the proposition of a middle ground elides the important activities involved in negotiating ‘place’. I am of the opinion that archaeologists should express these complexities and sites of attachment, rather than sealing them in a fate of complicity, so that the acknowledgement of what lies behind multiple meanings can be critically assessed and presented. In doing so, one not only ensures the transparency in the meanings that are produced, but they are left open to further negotiation, adding, in theory, to the mobility of places as gatherings, or things, not as fixed, immobile entities. Places flow. Creating place as a ‘be all and end all’ is problematic. This is an act that seems to me to be more like evading an important and fundamental issue: the multiplicities inherent in place and the problems that this brings.
One important concern, that in many ways is present in the book but not explicitly, is about the situatedness of place in terms of its temporality – as an issue concerned with the affects that time and its gathering bring to place (Lucas 2005; 2008; Witmore 2007). Temporality is discussed only in a few chapters, and for such a fundamental issue concerning place, it is woefully underrepresented in the book as a whole. Where it is considered, there is a view of time in a segmented fashion, in which layers accumulate, like a palimpsest. But time and place intersect in a wholly relational way that endures (cf Chapter Three). This occurs not in segmented units that lie somehow outside of place – the stop and start of place histories – but in the connections that flow and eddy (Serres and Latour 1995) through the practices and engagements that are irrational and irregular, transformative, as well as paradoxical in the material disclosures of presence and absence. And related to this issue of duration, is the fallibility of memory in the lost and occasionally renegotiated memories in the memorialization of place.
As the book rightly suggests, how memory makes place is an important issue but this unfortunately is a little too vaguely presented. Personal memory, as Walter Benjamin (1999) and Marcel Proust (1925) eloquently remind us, can be triggered by the sensual experience of mnemonics (memories embedded in things), of events and objects that may have been forgotten. But what of collective memory, the subject matter of this book? As Paul Connerton (1989) suggests, collective memory is activated through practical engagement. So far, fine, as these are present in the book. However, the processes of performance through bodily practices, either in habit or commemoration, and through the inscription or incorporation of practices that embed memory into memorials or specific locales, are only rarely explored (cf. Pearson and Shanks 2001; Pearson and Thomas 1994).
Furthermore, as the book acknowledges and tries to develop, memory is intertwined with two types of places: with places of memorial, such as a pilgrimage or a place-name, and at the locus of memory, such as a house or a street (Connerton 2009; and 1989). While the book is concerned with both of these ‘sites of memory’ it fails to consider the different memory processes that occur at each (the locale or activity area, and the monument). The difference is clearly more than simply building to commemorate at a locale, or establishing a locale in the creation of a monument through habitual practices that are in the future commemorated. The book discusses more examples of events of remembrance rather than the ways in which memory is actively made through practices of construction and through performance. Although there is great diversity in the ways in which places are actively remembered and represented, it is suggested that ‘middle ground’ provides “a useful concept for thinking about monuments in relation to ideas of shared versus segregated or mutually exclusive” histories (p. 28). This presents a problem, insofar as there will always be multiple meanings concerning place, and various senses of attachment, which will invariably both compete and complement. The point being made, is that there should not be a reliance on a single dominant discourse of place, that it should rather be an evaluation of place meanings (as many as is feasible). But I fear that the using ‘middle ground’ elides something of the uniqueness of these meanings by reducing the diversity that constitutes place as place. Rather than being reduced and fragmented, places should be represented in a way that maintains and holds onto their multiplicities.
We must also remember that the material presence of place cannot be substituted only by its meaning as well as how this is represented: The meaning of place stands in for, rather than stands for, material processes and forms (Witmore forthcoming). This perspective acknowledges that the one place can have many different meanings, any of which is an authentic portrayal. This occurs individually as well as collectively, and although the experiences will differ between individuals and groups, the contact with the same physical environment produces a shared sense of place. To further labor the point, which is missing in most of the papers, place then becomes a hub, or a gathering, in which sets of material entanglements and relations between different people, or between cosmologies, become clearer and dramatized.
A fundamental issue of placemaking and its meaning is not so much based on whether or not interpretations disagree or complement, or the way in which they are in a compromise, but rather understanding the way in which a placemaking is derived from multiple sources; demonstrating how place is an entangled mess and a sticky bundle of relations. As a result of this messiness, the processes of representation and the malleability of interpretations in creating authentic pasts would retain a much more critical appraisal than is expressed in this book, particularly one taking on board the slippery and ambiguous terms such as place, or landscape.
Important in this appraisal, contrary to the introduction, is the politics of place. While several of the papers explicitly point towards the political contexts of the placemaking process (e.g. Chapter Four), many do not. And this again seems to be fundamental but is not explicitly illustrated: The very fact that these texts have been written in a particular way, as a volume in the WAC One World Archaeology Series, and presented thematically as a study on Native American archaeology, suggests to me, at the very least, a specific status and authority a.k.a. politics. While simply resigning to an argument that politics is a reduction of a place’s specific complexity by suggesting that it creates only misinterpretations and misunderstandings is, again, a little naive. To be aware of the politics involved in both meanings and interpretations and to present them allows critical assessment, even though the experiences and presentations of place may radically differ. Place is negotiated through participation and experience which spreads itself differentially between individuals and groups. “Bridging the middle ground of monuments” (p. 31) does not hold promise to my mind but results in further misinterpretation and misrepresentation more than an approach which attempts to hold them productively simply because place is never a stable entity; it is constantly mutable, and depends on the sets of relations that come into contact with it. What emerges is different each time it is negotiated; just as would this book if it were written again in 50 years time.
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