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).

Fig. 1. Monument memes. Gifs: imgflip; me.me

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…