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10 Public Archaeology and Sense of Place in Alexandria, Virginia An Exploration of the Changing Significance of Fort Ward Park DOUGLAS R. APPLER T he passage of time can have a strong influence on the meaning that people attach to a particular location. As years pass and certain historical themes are seen by a larger number of people to be relevant to events in the present , the sites associated with those themes gain a higher public profile. This change can raise questions about how different events should be recognized and incorporated into the existing local historical narrative, particularly on sites that already possess strong, widely recognized historical identities. Responding to citizen interest, the city of Alexandria, Virginia, recently began the process of incorporating a new historical theme into the story of the city-owned Fort Ward Park, recognizing the significance of the African American community that developed around the former fort following the end of the Civil War and lasted until the development of the park in the early 1960s. Although the reorientation of the park’s significance is still very much in process, the experience of this Washington, D.C., suburb makes clear the extraordinary value of a highly engaged public archaeology program to a community struggling to make sure that its history truly reflects the contributions of all its citizens. Rather than being thought of as a luxury, the social networks and deep community knowledge engendered by city archaeology programs should instead be seen as an essential service. The creation of heritage is an active political process. It is the result of people in the present selecting those elements of the past that they want (or need) to maintain for current use (Lowenthal 1996; L. Smith 2006). When carried out in the public realm, it involves questions of access to power and authority, of defining experiences in personal and group identity, and of reconciling fundamentally different perceptions of what past events mean to those alive in the present (L. Smith 2004). It is, therefore, not without reason that recent authors have described heritage as “open to constant revision and change and . . . both a source and a repercussion of social conflict” (Ashworth, Graham, and Tunbridge Public Archaeology and Sense of Place in Alexandria, Virginia 173 2007, 3) or have identified the past as “everywhere a battleground of rival attachments” (Lowenthal 1990, 302). The process of learning about and interpreting the past from multiple perspectives can indeed involve social conflict, but that does not mean that it cannot also be seen as an opportunity for engagement and developing connections (L. Smith 2006). This chapter focuses on connections—between a community and its history, between local citizens and their government, and between two seemingly different stories that took place on the same ground. Historic Site, Modern Meaning Historic sites offer more than just their age; they are physically grounded symbols in the landscape, representing the ideas and events that have shaped a community through time (Hull, Lam, and Vigo 1994). They are also specific geographic locations experienced in some way, shape, or form daily by the local residents of a community. As such, they are perhaps better understood as places rather than things. The term “place” has many definitions, but an attempt to define it from one perspective centers on the idea that place is a “meaningful segment of geographic space” (Cresswell 2008, 134; see generally Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001; Cresswell 2004; Ley 1977; Malpas 2008; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). The benefits of framing meaningful sites as places rather than as things have been widely documented. For example, it is no longer seen as acceptable to divorce World Heritage Sites from their social context (Keitumetse, Matlapeng, and Monamo 2007; Mire 2007; Omland 2006; L. Smith 2006; UNESCO 2003). The inadequacy of using an object-oriented perspective to recognize the importance of many historic Native American sites has also been well documented (Baugher 1998; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2006; Watkins 2001). Sites of tremendous tragedy or violence are also treated differently because of their meaning to the surrounding community (Foote 2003; W. Logan and Reeves 2009). Put simply, meaning is what shapes our interaction with historic sites. One well-known example of what can happen when this relationship goes unrecognized comes from what is now the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City. During the construction of a thirty-four-story federal building in Manhattan, General Services Administration (GSA) officials discovered that they were building on a site previously...

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