The Stone’s Place: Dighton Rock Museum and Narratives of Power

The author tours Dighton Rock Museum as it appeared in 2013. He shows how the arrangement of interpretive options and the overwhelming amount of Portuguese material such as ship models lead a visitor to the inescapable conclusion that the Corte-Real theory is the correct one. He cites Michel-Rolph Trouillot: “Celebrations straddle the two sides of historicity. They impose a silence upon the events that they ignore, and they fill that silence with narratives of power about the event they celebrate.” As an interpretation of interpretations, the author argues, the museum is a crowning exercise of that power.

Colonization’s New Epistemology

This chapter describes the rise of scientific American archaeology in the early nineteenth century and its role in the justification of westward colonization and displacement of Indigenous people. Theorists construct two competing migrations: the transatlantic Gothicist one out of Northern Europe that is colonizing America, and the pre-Contact one of Tartars that arrived in America to displace the superior Mound Builders. American colonization is defended as a just displacing of Native Americans, who had previously displaced the Mound Builders. President Andrew Jackson relies on this scenario in 1830 in arguing for his forced removal policy that will cause the deaths of thousands of Cherokee and other tribes on the Trail of Tears in 1838

Altogether Ignorant

This chapter trace the rise of scholarly misinterpretations of Dighton Rock in the eighteenth century in writings of Cotton Mather and Harvard professors Isaac Greenwood, John Winthrop, and Stephen Sewall. The parallel evolution of human migration theories is traced in the writing of Jean-François Lafitau. Gothicism, a fusion of White race destiny, Noachic lineage, culture, republican liberty, and civilization, is introduced through the works of Olf Rudbeks, Pierre-Henri Mallet, and the Baron de Montesquieu. Ideas about Indigenous origins and human evolution are presented by the Comte de Buffon. Ezra Stiles includes Dighton Rock in his ideas about ancient Hebrew and Phoenician migrants. Phoenicians become the leading candidates for the rock’s markings. Contributions to migration theories are noted by Pehr Kalm and Johann Forster. Linnaeus, a protégé of Rudbeks’ son, develops his human racial scheme with Europeans a superior race, with further refinements by Johann F. Blumenbach and Christoph Meiners. Gothicist Europeans are championed as the superior human form while Indigenous people are thought to have descended from inferior Asian Tartars.

First Impressions and First Arrivals

This chapter relates the first decades of colonial interpretation of Dighton Rock after its markings were first described in 1680, mainly by John Danforth and Cotton Mather. It places the interpretation of the rock in the context of dispossession of Indigenous lands following the rebellion known as King Philip’s War. Erasure of Indigenous peoples from the history of colonial New England is discussed. It introduces contemporary theories rooted in Biblical hermeneutics of human migration and the relationship of Indigenous people to the rest of humanity, including ideas that they were descendants of Tartars, Canaanites, or the Lost Tribes of Israel. The author’s concept of White Tribism is explained.

Stones of Power

British writer and artist Edward Augustus Kendall visits Dighton Rock and other petroglyphs in a tour of New England in 1807-09. He writes an effective defense of Dighton Rock as the work of Indigenous people. His analysis is steeped in Masonic esotericism that Freemasonry arrived in North America long before colonizing Europeans did.

American Place-Making

Edmund Burke Delabarre’s Miguel Corte-Real theory for Dighton Rock is embraced by the Portuguese-American community of New England and becomes the dominant interpretation, leading to the creation of a state park and a museum housing the rock, which is removed from the Taunton River. Delabarre becomes a published authority on rock art, dismissing Indigenous markings as meaningless, childlike scribbiing that were imitative of European writing. After the Second World War, Dr. Manuel da Silva becomes the Corte-Real interpretation’s greatest champion and propagator.

Reversing Dighton Rock’s Polarity

American ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft continues his struggle to understand Dighton Rock and place it in his understanding of American prehistory. He visits the rock in 1849 and declares its markings to be a mix of Icelandic and Indigenous. He then reverses himself and says it is purely Indigenous, based on the reading provided him by the Ojibwa leader Shingwauk. Schoolcraft’s investigations are situated within the rise of the American Ethnological Society and his leading role in the New-York Historical Society, the growing controversy over polygenism and monogenism within his intellectual circle, his friendship and falling out with Ephraim Squier, and Schoolcraft’s conviction that an archaeological fake, the Grave Creek stone, is genuine.

Multiple Migrations

Esotericism enters the Dighton Rock debate through the French mythographer Antoine Court de Gébelin and Monde Primitif (1781), who believes it to be Phoenician. Ezra Stiles also favours the Phoenician interpretation and incorporates it into his Gothicist-tinged Election Sermon (1783) which presents the United States as a place of White destiny. American westward expansion produces encounters with the mysterious earthworks of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and fuels the rise of American archaeology. Thomas Pennant in Arctic Zoology (1784) makes an influential case for the Bering Strait hypothesis of the Indigenous arrival in the Americas. Corneille de Pauw publishes Recherches philosophiques (1768-69) arguing the degenerative effect on all life of the climate of the Americas.The Anglo-Irish antiquarian Charles Vallancey argues Dighton Rock was the work of ancient migrants from Asia who were moved aside by the inferior Tartar ancestors of Native Americans. Vallancey’s theory finds near-simultaneous acceptance in a circle of theorists around Stiles as an explanation for the so-called Mound Builders. The author defines this interpretation of American prehistory as the multiple migration displacement scenario.

Shingwauk’s Reading

This chapter explores efforts by the pioneering American ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to understand Dighton Rock, with the aid of the Ojibwa leader Shingwauk, using drawings in Antiquitates Americanae. It situates the rock’s interpretation within the rise of American ethnology, Schoolfcraft’s personal life, his coining of terminology for Native Americans, his view of the Mound Builders, his relationship with the men behind Antiquitates Americanae, and the polygenism versus monogenism debate for the origins of races. Artist George Catlin defends the Indigeneity of Dighton Rock.

A Lost Portuguese Explorer’s American Boulder

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s content and chief arguments. The reader is introduced to the interpretation of Dighton Rock as an artefact of the Portuguese explorer Miguel Corte-Real in Dighton Rock State Park Museum. Issues of misappropriation of Indigenous culture are introduced as well as problems in deciphering meaning in rock art. It introduces the author’s concept of “White Tribism.” It argues the story of Dighton Rock’s long history of misinterpretation as a non-Indigenous artefact uniquely illuminates processes of belonging, possession, and dispossession in colonialism from the first decades of the colonial period to the present day.