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ChaptEr sEvEntEEn Naval Monuments and Memorials Symbols in a Contested Landscape david J. stEwart introduCtion Memorials represent a form of material culture that both intentionally and unintentionally reflect the ideologies and values of those who create them. Intentionally because people consciously use memorials to convey ideals: patriotism, honor, and sacrifice, to name but a few. But memorials also encode unconscious messages that their creators may not be aware of and, accordingly, can reveal additional insights into the beliefs of those who created them. These simple premises motivate scholarship on memorials and memorialization, whether related to military or civilian sites. Since the 1960s, archaeologists have studied memorials and the rituals that take place at memorial sites in order to gain a better understanding of the conscious and unconscious beliefs that they convey (see Mytum 2004 for the best recent overview of memorialization studies). Naval monuments and memorials offer the opportunity to examine two distinct levels of society. Monuments are commissioned by governments to commemorate persons or events deemed significant to the nation as a whole. National monuments date back at least 3000 years, when the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III commemorated a victorious naval battle on the wall of his mortuary temple. While the creation of permanent memorials in the distant past was limited to rulers and governments, the last two centuries has witnessed the widespread creation of memorials by all classes of society. These folk-level naval memorials, created by members of the naval profession , often express very different views than their national counterparts. Because of this, memorials provide an excellent opportunity to examine the interplay between different, and sometimes competing , viewpoints. The struggle over remembrance is not limited to the monuments themselves. In addition to encoding values, both national and folk memorials occupy space in the landscape, and thus have the potential to serve as foci for subsequent activities. Groups that oppose the official version of history told on memorials sometimes use these sites as locations for protest. This chapter examines how naval memorials function as symbols in the contested landscape of remembrance . The first section discusses themes common to national-level naval memorials. The next section turns to the folk-level, to see how memorials created by naval sailors and officers compare to those of the nation. The final section examines the role that stateand folk-level memorials play in the contested story of remembrance. Most of the examples of nation-state memorials discussed are drawn from published sources of war memorials. The data for folk memorialization practices, on the other hand, comes from an ongoing study of maritime memorials conducted by the author (Stewart 2004, 2007). The goal of this project is to compare fifteenth through twentyfirst century maritime memorials from the United States and the United Kingdom. These memorials represent a cross-section of maritime life from the Age of Sail to the present, including monuments to naval seamen, merchant mariners, fishermen, and whalers, along with shore-based maritime occupations such as shipwrights, merchants, and dockyard workers. 198 david j. stewart national idEals Victory, Glory, Patriotism Monuments and memorials created by nation-states to commemorate significant persons or events are designed to perpetuate the ideals that the state wishes to associate with itself and the values that it claims to champion. Such monuments thus represent a conscious attempt to interpret history in the way that the nation wants it to be seen. State-sponsored naval memorials are no exception. Common themes on state naval memorials include victory, glory, patriotism , and honoring the dead who gave their lives to the national cause. Navies are fundamentally tools of war, and therefore it is not surprising that many nation-state naval memorials celebrate victory and the attendant glory that it brings to the nation, its leaders, or naval heroes. In fact, victory and glory form the theme of the earliest known memorial that includes a naval component. The Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III commissioned a relief for his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu depicting his victory over the Sea Peoples, a group of nomadic raiders who devastated the eastern Mediterranean near the end of the Bronze Age. The battle, which took place ca. 1176 b.C.E, was both a naval and a land engagement. The portion of the relief depicting the naval battle shows Egyptian ships ambushing and defeating those Sea Peoples on the Nile (Wachsmann 1988:166). On the relief, Ramesses is depicted much larger than other figures, in the midst of the battle shooting a bow at the...

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