The Forgotten Stories: Unearthing Mass Graves and Hidden Histories

2023-08-01 20:03:04

Published on August 01, 2023 at 22:03. Modified on August 01, 2023 at 22:11.

The Archeology of Evil

How to make the mass graves speak, whether they date from the Bronze Age or the Franco period? This is the work of researchers specializing in “forensic archaeology”. Disastrous journey, through the ages and continents.

On the waterfront of Port Angeles, a coastal town in the American West, a themed promenade retraces the history of the place in a few panels. On the first, the visitor learns that this piece of coast was home to a village of the Klallam people, occupied since the seventh century BC. The second panel is devoted to the “discovery” of the place by the Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza in 1791. The following ones evoke the stages of its colonial and American history. Native Americans who lived there and continued to live there are no longer mentioned.

With the exception of places specifically linked to important episodes in the encounter or confrontation between Amerindians and Europeans, this oversight is fairly common. Nothing particularly surprising for the anthropologist Lee Panich, professor at the University of Santa Clara, California, specialist in the relations between indigenous societies and colonial institutions: “History has long been written from the point of view of the colonizer “.

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