Presented by Katherine Hayes

Archaeology undertaken in service of preservation in the 20th century often reflected the values of the time.  At Historic Fort Snelling, archaeology served to bolster a distinctly non-inclusive narrative of American enterprise at the frontier and the triumph of settler rugged individualism. Yet the excavated remains do still hold remnants of other stories at odds with that narrative.  In this talk I discuss some of the current efforts to use artifact collections and absent landscapes to bring greater public attention to these other stories,  how the reconstructed Fort complicates those efforts, and how digital space (e.g. virtual reality and augmented reality) might contribute to our goals.