Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past: The View from Southern Maryland
In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of  sources and disciplinary approaches—archaeological, historical,  architectural, literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on,  convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay  region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from  patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day  archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes  into historical, indeed sacred, spaces.    The sites King examines include the region’s vanishing tobacco  farms; St. Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first capital by  English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the  location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil  War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with  such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as  competing ones. St. Mary’s City, for example, early on became the center  of Maryland’s “founding narrative” of religious tolerance, a view  commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today  in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout,  one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated  to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology  that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians  of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the  area’s Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on  recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become  the recounting of ghost stories.    As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory  in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region’s more vexing legacies,  particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own  discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating  old narratives, King calls for research—particularly archaeological  research—that produces new stories and “counter-narratives” that  challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more  nuanced grasp of a complicated past.Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s  College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program  and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring,  documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake  communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, ofIndian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.