Worth(Less)

The small industrial town of Texas, Maryland, employed hundreds of Irish immigrants in the quarrying and burning of limestone during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter by Adam Fracchia examines patterns of value based on categories of class, ethnicity, and race that were influenced by and necessary to ensure the profitability of the quarry industry. Historical records in combination with material culture illustrate shifts in these values over time and the patterns of marginalization that led to the removal of Texans and the destruction of their property. Ultimately, the preservation of the town is governed by similar notions of value tied to the current mode of production and a static perception of the town’s heritage that indirectly supports its continued destruction.

Mapping Chickasaw Removal

Representations of land such as maps and surveyors’ notes played an important role in facilitating the institutionalized removal of nineteenth-century Mississippi Chickasaws. This chapter discusses the epistemology of maps and property claims, and the social implications of land division and commoditization. It also follows the multidirectional tactics of displacement and nascent articulations of modern indigenous land rights. Weik illustrates how archaeologists can play a role in tracking Native American experiences before, during, and after removal.

The Janus Face of Removal

Removal is two-faced. It simultaneously presents disaster and opportunity. Its effects may leave permanent scars on the landscape and within the minds of individuals and their descendants who suffered removal at the hands of others. Archaeologists paradoxically can benefit by removal to the extent that the remains discovered at past habitation sites may reveal realities left unmentioned or purposely silenced in textual sources. The Great Famine of the 1840s in Ireland provides an example of the Janus face of removal.

Creating a Community in Confinement

In 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Relocation disrupted existing social networks, first through displacement and then through separation between the ten primary internment centers. Evidence revealed through archaeological study of one such site—Amache, Colorado—highlights the strategies of individuals living in these haphazard arrangements for creating more cohesive social groups and contributes to the disciplinary conversation about the critical role neighborhoods can play in community formation among the relocated.

Removal and Remembering

Audrey Horning’s chapter examines U.S. policy, the national park system, popular representations of hill people who were displaced from their residences, and shifting Appalachian land use during the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter explores the ways various important factors, including race relations, conservation, poverty programs, and community development, all worked to create removal. Artifacts, local people’s writings, and archival evidence illustrate how uprooted people challenged mass mediated, academic, and institutional narratives about the dispossessed. This chapter illustrates at multiple scales the nuances of individual experiences, the diverse social interests involved, and the insights of a comparative perspective.

Whitewashing an African American Landscape

Orange County, Virginia, has maintained a rural agricultural identity since the eighteenth century. During this time the labor, political, economic, and agricultural systems have gone through dramatic changes. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the end of slavery and rise of industrial agriculture played significant roles in the shaping of the physical and social landscape. Ultimately, this resulted in dramatic declines in the population of African Americans followed by a sustained migration that prevented the population from growing. This paper highlights five capitalist processes that resulted in the prolonged and steady removal of African Americans from the county.

Introduction

This introductory chapter by Terrance Weik provides a broad perspective on the multiple scholarly discourses, historical experiences, and related phenomena that are associated with removal. A working definition is articulated that embraces the plurality of ways dispossession and forced migration are manifest, conceptualized, and pursued. This chapter situates removal within a body of social theories as well as archaeological practices. Previous research that has set the stage for this volume is considered, ranging from clearance to dam archaeology.

“We Can Fly No Farther”

Chapter 2 by Alex Flick and Julia King explores the relationship between memory, place, and the post-Contact dispossession of indigenous lands on Maryland’s western shore. Documentary, oral, and archaeological evidence reveal how the colonial dispossession of land and the accompanying displacement of Native people proceeded hand in hand with the removal and/or appropriation of the material signs of the indigenous past. Displaced people, however, resisted this erasure in the remaking of place. Those who left the region adopted new practices while retaining familiar ones including, in the case of the Maryland Indians, a persistence in hunting, wigwam, and canoe construction and in mortuary practices reminiscent of ossuary practices known in the homeland. Those who remained in the region maintained and perpetuated memories of culturally significant places through repeated acts of visitation and oral tradition.

Topographies of Removal

Archaeological studies tend to examine prisons as individual sites that order space and restrict mobility. Prisons are not isolated places, however. They are distributed across vast landscapes, forming carceral archipelagos that serve the purpose of removing undesirable populations from political life. Over time, this practice of social banishment has given shape to what I call “topographies of removal”—a geography capable of obscuring the political violence of prisons. Rethinking the archaeology of prisons means revealing the historical silences and blind spots contained in these topographies.