The Crimsoned Hills of Onondaga: Romantic Antiquarians and the Eu ...

I believe it is important to look at the writing not solely as a misdirected precursor to the literature of academic archaeology (although it has an ambivalent relationship to the discipline) but as a part of American imaginative literature from which we can gain new insights into the national character. As a framework for the analysis in the pages ahead, I have identified five elements that characterize Romantic Antiquarian writing, which are defined below. These elements will be explored as they manifest themselves in writing about New York’s prehistory.

Ideology

The U.S. Romantic Antiquarians shared the belief that Native Americans were incapable of attaining a high level of civilization. The persistence of a belief in the inferiority of Native Americans in the dominant Euro-American culture from colonial times into the Jacksonian era and its relation to western expansion is documented in Roger G. Kennedy’s Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization. The book also examines the role of widespread and often corrupt land speculation practices in fuelling the western movement; it provides detailed descriptions of the massive scale and architectural design of earthwork complexes, most now obliterated, in the U.S. heartland.

In much Romantic Antiquarian writing, the Iroquois are singled out as being particularly reprehensible; they are often given credit for being originally barbaric nomads who gained their territory by brutally slaughtering the more civilized non-Indian race(s) that preceded them. Thus, Romantic Antiquarian writing in the United States during a period of massive expansion functioned as propaganda, disseminating a disguised, yet repetitive message of Euro-American cultural superiority while at the same time negating (or erasing) the significance and accomplishments of Native American cultures. This discourse effectively penetrated the realms of oral lore, popular culture, scholarly writing, and religion.