Saturday, January 6, 2024
Grand Ballroom (Hilton Union Square)
In 1914, William C. Mills, curator of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, published Archeological Atlas of Ohio, in which he mapped known “prehistoric” sites in the state. At the time of the atlas’ publication, Mills believed there to be 4,105 Indigenous mounds in Ohio, but he acknowledged that a number of these structures had already been destroyed. A focus solely on physical destruction, however, obscures the ways in which settlers sought to transform Indigenous mounds. Much like scholars shows that White settlers were able and willing to convert the fields and orchards of contemporary American Indians into the foundation for settler agriculture, settlers similarly interacted with Indigenous mounds by not only physically destroying them but by transforming others into settler structures. Analysis of 19th century county atlases and “scientific” surveys attest to this transformation. Generally, atlases lack depictions of Indigenous mounds, despite their ubiquitous presence on Ohio’s landscape. The absence of mounds on these atlases constitutes a key tenet of settler colonialism, in which indigeneity is “erased.” Interestingly, mounds and earthworks became visible in these atlases after they had been symbolically transformed by settlers. Settlers have used Native mounds as resources for agriculture, construction, and infrastructure, as facades and foundations for settler institutions, and as depositories for deceased settlers, claiming responsibility and heritage of these structures. The irony of Mill’s 1914 Archeological Atlas is that it attempted to fix the 19th century erasure of Indigenous Ohio on settler maps. His solution was to print, in red, the locations of the various sites of American Indian land use on top of county maps that were printed in black. Indigenous structures transformed by settlers appear twice on Mills’ maps, once in black ink on the underlying county map and once in red ink, printed on top.