Narrative, Archaeology, and Indigenous Landscapes

Preserving the view from Mount Vernon unexpectedly preserved an equally significant landscape: the homeland and ancient capital of the Piscataway nation. The Piscataway were a powerful Native group on the Potomac who found themselves increasingly fenced in, at first, by their Native neighbors, and then by the colonists. This 'storied' landscape -- and it is nothing less -- can suggest the Native landscape underlying a 21st century suburbanizing (and invented) place. But it's not just the landscape's history, but the history of that history, or how the landscape's story has been told, where, when, and and by whom. This presentation suggets how much later stories always inform earlier onesand how archaeology has -- for better and for worse -- become part of this process.