Spectacles of Settler Colonial Memory: Archaeological Findings from an Early Twentieth-Century "First" Settlement Pageant and Other Commemorative Terrain in New England

Meghan C L Howey; Christine M DeLucia

doi:10.1007/s10761-021-00635-2

Spectacles of Settler Colonial Memory: Archaeological Findings from an Early Twentieth-Century "First" Settlement Pageant and Other Commemorative Terrain in New England

Int J Hist Archaeol. 2022;26(4):974-1007. doi: 10.1007/s10761-021-00635-2. Epub 2022 Jan 1.

Authors

Meghan C L Howey^{1

2}, Christine M DeLucia³

Affiliations

¹ Anthropology Department, University of New Hampshire, 73 Main Street, Durham, NH 03824 USA.
² Earth Systems Research Center, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire, Morse Hall, Durham, NH 03824 USA.
³ History Department, Williams College, Hollander Hall, Williamstown, MA 01267 USA.

Abstract

In 1923, rural New England mill town Dover, New Hampshire, staged a Tercentenary pageant of extraordinary proportions to celebrate its "first" settlement. This public spectacle memorialized a specific, and deeply exclusionary, narrative of English settler colonialism, shaped by social anxieties of the post-First World War United States. Recent archaeological research has found possible remnants from this spectacle on a seventeenth-century site. In disturbing this site, the Tercentenary pageant appears to have disregarded actual significant material traces from the very era it aimed to memorialize--traces that offer distinct, fuller understandings of deeply nuanced Native-settler interactions in the Piscataqua River region. Dover's pageant is situated in a regional analysis of Native and Euro-colonial commemorative place-making of the early twentieth century, exploring how different communities pursued multivocal, monovocal, or other approaches in their performative engagements with the seventeenth century.

Keywords: Memory; New England; Replicas; Settler colonialism; Spectacle.