ABSTRACT
If landscapes, popular opinion, and personal disciplines acted to create the appearance of liberty, wide participation, and opportunity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then could a public discussion of this topic illuminate the action of ideology today? In order to look at this question, I presented the discoveries described here in public, using archaeological explorations, and asked people to ponder the effects for themselves. One would ordinarily characterize this as a function of educational museums or as some element of the purpose of historic preservation. Museums’ and historic preservation’s purpose is to teach, or to educate the present about the past, with some understanding that the past itself has something to tell. But I found, to my surprise, that that is not their function after all. This discovery was the key to understanding the ideological reuse of these archaeological materials.
