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Past Is Prologue
Archaeology’s Lessons for Confederate Monuments
It’s easy to understand what monuments want us to remember — and harder to see what they wish we’d forget
The murder of George Floyd has breathed renewed urgency into calls for the removal of Confederate symbols from public display. These outcries are by now familiar, echoing the pleas to abolish Confederate flags from statehouses following the AME church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, and the protests surrounding the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. Activists’ efforts to cast Confederate monuments as symbols of white supremacy have been met with claims of their historical value and defenses of Southern heritage. These disputes play out in public hearings, newspaper editorials, YouTube comments, and especially on social media, where memes mocking the sensitivity of the left or the ignorance of the right continue to circulate (fig. 1).
Often overlooked in media coverage of the debates and demagoguery are the monuments themselves. Sweeping pronouncements about their cultural significance are rarely accompanied by even a cursory description of their appearance. Likewise, it has been my experience that, when challenged, few people can summon even the vaguest impression of what Confederate monuments actually look like, though they may cherish them as their heritage. But in a debate about monuments, the monuments themselves matter. We cannot defend, oppose, or claim to understand them without first looking at their symbols, reading their inscriptions, learning their history, and walking in their shadows. What can monuments actually tell us about the past? You don’t hear this often, but archaeology may have an answer.
Some skepticism is warranted. Archaeology is widely considered an esoteric pursuit, a discipline more concerned with trivial debates about ancient garbage than the serious issues of the modern world. I feel this way fairly often myself, particularly on long summer afternoons spent alone in a storage facility 5,000 miles from home measuring broken pieces of pottery. But archaeology, as the study of the past through its material remains, has long grappled with the complexity of monuments and offers valuable frameworks for interrogating our…
