The Place of Stone

Observed by English colonists in 1680, Dighton Rock is a mysterious forty-ton boulder, originally situated in the Taunton River near Berkley, Massachusetts. The unusual object is now displayed in a small museum in nearby Dighton Rock State Park. The rock, as originally described by seventeenth-century colonists, is covered in distinct petroglyph carvings. Seemingly everyone from ancient Egyptians to the lost tribes of Israel to Vikings to ambitious Chinese explorers have been credited with creating the rock's markings. Most notably, the Brown University psychology professor Edmund B. Delabarre made waves when, in 1912, he proclaimed the rock's markings to be linked to Miguel Corte-Real's ill-fated 1502 expedition from Portugal. Delabarre's assertion is important, as it would place Portuguese explorers in North America more than one hundred years before their English counterparts. Although many credible scientists and archaeologists moved past the Portuguese theory, others persisted in their refusal to attribute the rock's markings to Native Americans. The author and historian Douglas Hunter uses the varied interpretations of the Dighton Rock markings to demonstrate how Native American histories and places are dispossessed and erased in the colonial process. “Dighton Rock's interpretations,” Hunter argues, “have been a tour de force of colonization” (p. 18

Archaeology · Assertion · Colonialism · Ethnology · Indigenous · Native american · Portuguese · Rock art · State (computer science · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Archaeology and Natural History · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Philosophy

• Always a Trace

  L M Brady, John Bradley et al.•Current Anthropology•2024

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