digging up a national past, by rachel lew

8/11/2019 Digging up a National Past, by Rachel Lew

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Digging up a National Past:Archaeology and Landscape in the Construction of

History in John Egan and Dr. Dickesons Panorama ofthe Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley

Rachael Lew

In 1851, an advertisement announcing the opening of A Grand Moving Diorama of the

Mississippi Valley and its Indian Antiquities, appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper. Set

to begin at quarter to eight oclock, the presentation of the diorama or moving panorama,

measuring two metres in height and over one hundred metres in length, would be

described by Professor M. W. Dickeson as it was unfurled, and further supplemented by

his cabinet of Indian Curiosities.1 Fourteen years earlier Dr. Montroville Wilson

Dickeson had departed from his hometown of Philadelphia for a seven-year long

archaeological trip through the southeastern states along the Mississippi and Ohio River

Valleys, with the goal of excavating the numerous mounds, tumuli, and various earthworks

that dotted the landscape in mysterious silence. His objective was to understand the

societal evolution and history of the prehistoric indigenous people (predating the present-

day Indians whose numbers were then fast dwindling).2 !e extensive collection of

artifacts he amassed throughout this period of intense activity was first exhibited in

agricultural fairs at Washington and Natchez, Mississippi, and a more formal written

report including drawings of mound groups and their contents was published in an 1848

issue of e Lotus, a Philadelphia periodical.3

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1 Bertha L. Heilbron, A Mississippi Panorama,Minnesota History23, no. 4 (Dec. 1942): 353.

2 In an 1848 notebook entry, Dickeson rhetorically demanded, But who shall tell the era of the origin ofthese venerable earth heaps! !e race of their builders, the purpose of their erection, the thousand circumstancesattending their rise, history, and desertionwhy now so lonely and desolate? M.W. Dickeson, Catalog of Stoneand Terra Cotta Implements and Ornaments of the North American Mound Builders (1848), DickesonCollection, University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, Philadelphia,quoted in Richard Veit, Mastodons,Mound Builders, and Montroville Wilson Dickeson-Pioneering American Archaeologist,Expedition41, no. 3

(November 1999): 20.3 Heilbron, 352.


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Interestingly, the publication of archaeological discoveries in books, magazines, and

newspapers in the cultural centres of the United States was commonplace in the middle

of the nineteenth century, with scientists making a point of communicating their findings

directly to the public and not through an institutional intermediary.4Perhaps that is why

Dickesons choice of a popular visual medium, the panorama, seems such anunconventional means of presenting archaeological findings to an audience. !e

associations of showmanship and popular appeal which accompany the panorama appear

to clash with the seemingly scholarly tone of scientific research. Whether motivated by a

desire to address a larger public on a grander, more sensational scale, or by the need to

make money to fund another archaeological trip, Dickeson asked artist John Eganan

Irish migr about whom we know almost nothingto create an extended panorama,

based on the drawings he made on location.5 !is would have been a strange

commission, as he would have been required to produce a work that was educational, yet

compelling for an audience already familiar with the moving panorama as a mass

medium. Part of my essay seeksto understand how Egan negotiated the demands of the

medium, while borrowing elements from the spheres of landscape art and archaeological

reporting.

In e"ect, what Dickesons audience was faced with was quite unlike the moving

panoramas in vogue since the 1840s. Like the longitudinal panoramas painted by

itinerant painters John Banvard, Samuel Hudson, and Henry Lewis throughout the

decade, Egans vast Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley(1850) is

a long, unfurling painting on muslin, rather than a circular three-hundred and sixty degree

canvas that the format panorama typically evokes.6Each end of this 2 x 106 metre-long

painting was attached to a mechanically driven upright cylinder, so that only one sectionof the painting was exposed at a time.7 !e painted fabric, encased in a wooden frame

concealing the mechanism, was rolled from one end to the other before an audience

seated directly in front of it, as the artist, or in this case Dr. Dickeson, lectured on an

adjacent raised platform. Previous extended panoramas, shown in the countrys urban

centres, exploited their kinetic format in order to simulate boat travel along the

Mississippi or Hudson Rivers,8and as a result were structured like a linear journey: each

geographical site followed the next and each night followed day in a logical progression.9

Far from adhering to the spatial and temporal coordinates of actual travel, Egans

panorama is a montage of twenty-five scenes with no obvious coherent organization.

Tableaux depicting the prehistoric mounds and their excavation in areas as distant as

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4 Steven Conn, Archaeology, Philadelphia, and Understanding Nineteenth-Century American Culture,in Philadelphia and the Development of Americanist Archaeology, eds. D. Fowler and D. R. Wilcox (Tuscaloosa,Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 165. See also Veit, 20.

5 John F. McDermott,e Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),1701.

6 For more information on these artists and their panoramas see McDermott .

7 Stephan Oettermann, e Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 66.

8 Oettermann, 63.

9 For example, Samuel Hudsons Panoramic View of the Hudson River (1848) condensed four days andthree nights of travel into a one to two hour presentation. See Oettermann, 326.


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Ohio and Louisiana along with present-day Indian life are interspersed with specific

historical events such as the 1727 battle between the French and the Natchez Indians or

the 1542 burial of Spanish explorer De Soto. !e sequencing of these disparate vignettes,

often separated by frames of trees or rock formations, frustrate any kind of logical

understanding of the limits of space and time, flipping back and forth, north and south.Wolfgang Born writes o"the inclusion of sensational scenes as a marketing ploy designed

to draw in the crowds who might have resented the educational slant of the panorama.10

Unfortunately, no record of Dickesons actual lecture, which might help to elucidate this

peculiar ordering, survives. Hence, this visual work is dependent on what is ostensibly

outside of the framethe narrative of Dr. Dickeson and his collection of artifactsfor

complete intelligibility, and anything we can glean from it today is inevitably partial.

Conceivably, this is the reason the Dickeson-Egan panorama has been paid little

attention, as most academic study on American moving panoramas of the 1840s and

1850s has tended to be limited to the travelogue-type works mentioned above.11Typically

analyzed apart from the vogue for panoramas, Egans work has fascinated some scholars

interested in its depiction of black slaves and Native Indians, in scenes showing the

former excavating mounds, and the latter overlooking the prehistoric monuments from a

distance. Janet Whitmore claims that the Indians are relegated to the sidelines, becoming

little more than storybook characters, no longer even deserving of the human dimension

accorded the slaves.12 Meanwhile, Angela Miller perceives the present-day Indians in

Egans painting as signalling cultural decline or a diminished present, placed as they

are before the great monuments of past civilizations, passively looking on.13She situates

her interpretation in the social and political discourses of the time, connecting Dickesons

visual aid to the myth of the Mound-Builders, which maintained that the ancientpeople who had constructed the monumental earthworks (the Mound-Builders) were a

semicivilized group of settlers, and were invaded (and eventually made extinct) by the

savage and nomadic ancestors of present-day Indians.14 It then followed that the

European conquest of America was just the latest in a long line of land disputes, and the

continued American appropriation of land from contemporary Indians was merely in

keeping with the cyclical pattern of the rise and fall of empires. 15 Given its highly

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10 Wolfgang Born,American Landscape Painting(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 96.

11 See McDermott and Angela Miller, Space as Destiny: !e Panorama Vogue in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America, in World Art:emes of Unity in Diversity, ed. I. Lavin, vol. 3 (University Park and London:

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 73944.

12 Janet L. Whitmore, A Panorama of Unequaled Yet Ever-Varying Beauty, in Currents of Change. Artand Life Along the Mississippi River 1850-1861, ed. J. T. Busch et al. (Minneapolis: !e Minneapolis Institute ofArts, 2004), 56.

13 Angela Miller, !e Soil of an Unknown America: New World Lost Empires and the Debate overCultural Origins,American Art8, no. 34 (SummerAutumn 1994): 18.

14 Miller, !e Soil of an Unknown America, 8.

15 According to Miller, this myth developed out of two competing national ideals in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, one expansionist, and the other an agrarian model of stable settlement. !e formers adherents justifiedtheir decimation of American Indians with this myth, while the latters followers identified with what theybelieved were the settler lifestyles of Americas original dwellers. See Miller, !e Soil of an Unknown America,1114. In spite of these divisive opinions, a view of the noble savage nevertheless persisted as evidenced in

Indian portraits commissioned by American-Europeans during this period. See Stephen Williams, FantasticArchaeology: the Wild Side of North American Prehistory(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 43.


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romanticized and evocative expedition into the mysteries of the Mound-Builders and the

curious reversals of history that characterized the cycles of empire in the New World,

Miller argues that the panorama and accompanying lecture were reflective and

constitutive of this myth.16

Although Millers work has been significant in constructing a social and politicalcontext for the Dickeson-Egan panorama, it fails to resolve the panoramas inconsistent

spatial-temporal organization alluded to above, vaguely absorbing it into her argument

that the work expresses the dominant historical view of the cycles of empire.17Certainly

each scene could be related in one way or another to the theme of the ascent and collapse

of civilization, nevertheless this explanation is insu#cient in providing a rationale for the

layout of the panorama, which follows neither a cyclical nor linear pattern of time. Rather

than being arranged progressively along the chronological axis that the longitudinal

format implies, events are dispersed haphazardly along this ribbon-like surface regardless

of their location or time. Lisa Lyons, analyzing the work for a recent exhibition, similarly

did not know what to make of the spatial and temporal disjunctions of Egans panorama,

summing up the collection of geographically disparate vignettes as Dickesons

fictionalized view of the history of the Mississippi Valley from the mid-16th to the

mid-19th century.18 Even this description fails to completely remove the moving

panorama from chronological conventions, which likely has to do with the mode of

address which the spectator was prompted to adopt. Instead of consuming the images

contents in a single glance, the viewer was impelled to scan or read the unfolding image,

taking in point after point on a horizontal axis, as Wolfgang Born describes it. 19

Moreover, it encouraged the seated spectator to view each scenes vertical edge (and

necessary transition to the next scene) as the future, while each viewed scene wasprogressively rolled back onto the opposite spool, like an accumulating past. !ese

temporal reference points are thus embedded not only in the paintings subject matter, but

in the experiential quality of the display of this long moving image via a mechanical

apparatus.

Let us turn to how an American past is represented by Egan, who repurposes

pictorial strategies of landscape art in order to visually spotlight the mounds and other

earth formations under Dr. Dickesons study. In the opening scene of the panorama, a

birds eye view of the Marietta Mounds in Ohio is introduced by the Ojibwe Indians.

!eir placement in the left foreground encourages us to accept these present-day Indians

as our guides. Side-by-side in colourful dress, the two men stand above the moundgroup, with one pointing directly to the site, beckoning his companion to lookinstead,

the feathered figures gesture seems directed to us, the viewers. If the men function as a

rhetorical device inviting us to look at the site, then we are further encouraged to enter

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16 At the same time, the Dickeson-Egan panorama seems slightly critical of the worldview informing thismyth, particularly in passages where the haunting presence of the Indians in the margins of the landscape can beread as a warning to Americans of the perils of imperial ambitions. See Miller, !e Soil of an UnknownAmerica, 11; 16.

17 Miller, !e Soil of an Unknown America, 18.

18 Lisa Lyons, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, in e River: Images of

the Mississippi, ed. M. Friedman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre, 1976), 32.19 Born, 96.


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into the space itself by the features of landscape Egan positions in the foreground. A

steep crevasse of cracked red earth opens onto the foreground, and seems to lead

downward toward the Marietta mounds. !is makeshift or natural passageway is framed

on either side by a pair of intertwined trees on the left and the scraggly tree trunk on

lingering, foliate branch leans forward, following the angle of the plunging trench. !e

trees on the opposite side of the trench further help to draw us into the view of the

mounds. Rendered in more exact brushwork, and glowing in sunlight, the leaves and

twisted branches of the tree elegantly dip down into the view of the mounds, inviting our

contemplation. !us, both our bodys and our eyes entrance into the view beyond is

facilitated through these landscape features and the figures of the Ojibwe organized in the

foreground.

!is spatial organization, which positions the viewer at the summit of a hillock, in a

foreground filled with rocks, trees, and bushes, before dropping down dramatically into a

majestic, expansive view in the middle foreground, is consistent with landscape painting

produced at the time in the Northeast. For example, Asher B. Durands View Toward the

Hudson Valley(1851) similarly organizes a high vantage point on a mountains edge in the

foreground, followed by a sudden drop in depth that extends out into a broad, idyllic

vista.20 !ough less elegant and smooth in its attempt at aerial perspective and in its

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20 Twenty years earlier,!omas Cole was utilizing a similar pictorial organization for his landscapes. His

View from Mount Holyoke(1836) has been cited as an attempt at a panoramic view. See Born, 97; Lee Parry,Landscape !eater in America,Art in America59, no. 6 (Nov.Dec. 1971): 58.

Fig. 1. John J. Egan, Marietta Ancient Fortification: A Grand View of their Walls, Bastions, Ramparts, and Fossa,with the Relics erein Found, ca. 1850. Distemper on cotton muslin. Courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum, ElizaMcMillan Trust. Catalogue number: 34:1953.


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planar transitions, Egans work exhibits the same spatial progression from foreground to

distance that became the hallmark of the midcentury American landscape formula.21

In addition to its structural similarities to contemporaneous landscape art, Egans

scene also owes something to an earlier view of the Marietta mounds in Ephraim G.

Squier and Edwin H. Daviss Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848).Published by the Smithsonian Institution, this was the first major archaeological volume

to focus exclusively on American sites and artifactsit featured this image as its cover

plate.22!e remarkable likeness between the painted muslin scene and the engraved plate

raises the question of whether or not Egan had pulled his compositional structure directly

from this volume. Whatever the case, Egan does make some significant changes,

including a greater emphasis on the mounds themselves and a stark reduction of material

in the foreground. First, he tilts the strip of land housing the earthworks toward the

picture plane for our visual consumption. From this green, remarkably even surface,

swollen mounds of di"ering sizes emerge, inside and outside therectangular enclosures.

With their di"erent rounded or flattened tops, the mounds cast solemn shadows against

the ground, and their protruding shapes are echoed in the hilly mountain range lying on

the horizon. Separated by the Ohio River, these hills and the ancient earthworks are

bathed in soft yellow and pink light, urging us perhaps to consider the natural and the

man-made as connected to each other. At odds with the rounded forms of the landscape

are the colonial-style buildings that dot the landscape. !e geometric angularity of these

structures triangular roofs contrasts with the looser, more rounded forms of the mounds

and of nature itself. !us, Egan can perhaps be seen as naturalizing these relics of

prehistoric human culture. Furthermore, in the artists hands, Marietta is also rendered

more accessible to the spectator: the clutter of entwined branches and brush obstructingany possible passage that might lead down to the mounds is cleared in Egans version, as

mentioned previously.

In the tableaux that follow the Marietta, Ohio site, the earthworks in all their

myriad incarnations become a familiar sight. Take for instance the seventh scene, Twelve

gated Labyrinth, Missouri, where the peninsula along the Mississippi River, housing the

concentric enclosures and mounds, is bent forward to lie almost parallel to the picture

plane, highlighting the rounded volumes of these monuments.23As present-day Indians

are occupied with fishing, a bright rainbow pierces through a cloud-filled grey sky, and

fortuitously aligns itself with one of the prehistoric hillocks. A meteorological

phenomenon is thus deployed by Egan perhaps to reinforce the association of the moundswith the natural world: the continued importance of the ancient past in the present is

here translated in visual terms. Indeed, even as commercial activity along the Mississippi

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21 Angela Miller argues that midcentury American landscapes followed a narrative formula of sorts inwhich the planar delineation of space was accomplished along temporal lines that supported a reading of theconquest of nature for social and economic usage. See e Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and

American Cultural Politics, 18251875(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 82.

22 Robert C. Dunnell, Archaeology in the Lower Mississippi Valley, in Times River: ArchaeologicalSyntheses from the Lower Mississippi River Valley, eds. J. Ra"erty and E. Peacock (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 2008), 21.

23 All scene titles are based on the list in a surviving handbill advertising Dickesons exhibition of thepanorama. See Heilbron, 351.


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was increasing thanks to the advent of the steamboatwhich allowed for the large-scale

transport of goodsthe mounds in Egans work never fade from the American horizon,

as evidenced in Baluxie Shell Mounds (scene 18).24 Bordering the Mississippi, seven

conical mounds are grouped together symmetrically on a steep cli"and loom high above

the river, blending in with the muted green of the neighbouring landscape, yet stillprominently outlined in shadow.25!eir bulbous quality is only accentuated by the jagged

edges of nearby depressions in the ground. In contrast to the monumental stillness of that

arrangement, the steamboat Magnolia chugs upstream on the bottom register, placed

directly below the earthworks a few registers up. In narrating Egans scene, we could

imagine Dickeson saying to his audience that even with exciting technological advances

in transportation and trade occurring in the present, the ancient knolls remained

nonetheless an ine"aceable part of American history, and an early feat of engineering in

their own right.

!roughout the panorama, the images of the mound and other fossa are endlessly

repeated. In addition to the scenes mentioned above, mounds also take centre stage in

Temple of the Sun, Georgia (scene 24) and Terraced Mound in a Snow Storm at Sunset(scene

6), where the landscape is nearly emptied of any human figures, and we are left to admire

the lone mounds in their natural environment. Basking in the glow of the bright, hot

southern sun, or covered in a blue-tinged layer of snow and ice, the temple and burial

mounds appear permanent and firmly grounded, unaltered by changes of season and

weather. Additionally, if we take into account the way in which these vignettes were

displayed, unfurling one after the other, there necessarily developed an expectation in the

spectator of seeing more and more mounds. With that view, perhaps we can understand

the repetition as functioning not only to familiarize American viewers with the remnantsof a prehistoric people, but to fabricate a national past by naturalizing and historicizing it

within the parameters of a known present. Here, I borrow from Ann Jensen Adamss

study of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. She has argued that Dutch

painters created naturalistic landscapes that provided a comforting and stable vision of

their land for a citizenry forging new political institutions and to a population

constituted by a large number of immigrants.26 As the argument goes, in lieu of

displaying the reality of the depicted locations, these landscapes largely ignored the

commercial and political factors that were changing the shape of them. More than just

aesthetic objects then, these paintings manufactured a communal history for a diverse

population and couched it in the land.27

In a parallel fashion, Egans panorama could beseen as endowing the ancient constructions with the symbols of national identity at a time

when the concept of American nationhood was fragile.

Following the War of Independence, there grew a very natural nationalism in the

newly formed United States, according to Stephen Williams, but identity was still

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24 Miller, Space as Destiny, 739.

25 Lyons, 32.

26 Ann Jensen Adams, Competing Communities in the Great Bog of Europe: Identity and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape, in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1983), 65.27 Ibid, 65.


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understood in terms of state and local a#liations.28Historian Daniel Boorstin, interested

in the development of the American mindset after the Revolution, insists that citizens of

this literate but new and insecure nation were seeking eagerly for signs and symbols of

their nationality, leading to what he has broadly labelled a Quest for a National Past.29

While Boorstins study traces the emergence of an American identity in textual sources,buoyed by the establishment of American historical societies in the 1810s through the

1830s and the popularity of historical biographies,30Williams insists that archaeologists

were also actively engaged in this quest, looking to material remains for answers. !e

search, according to him, was further motivated by competition between the Old World

and the New: there was a deeply felt need to prove the quality of America, to defend it

from rather scurrilous attacks from abroad.31One way of doing so, as !omas M. Allen

suggests in his work on nineteenth-century American culture, was to embed Americas

cultural and political importance into the history of the land. He concurs with Williams:

As a self-consciously new nation, occupying the territory of a new world, America

sought historical roots for itself, to anchor itself in time.32Allen argues that the relatively

new concept of an expanded time scale, put forward independently by geologists James

Hutton and Charles Lyell, was gaining familiarity and credence, providing analternative

to biblical or messianic time.33 If land gained symbolic prominence in the American

imagination, it was as a result of geological theory, which made it possible for

Americans to imagine the land as a repository of timeages of time stretching

unfathomably far into the depths of the earth.34!e fabrication ofa national past was

thus pursued in a material, concrete fashion by antiquarians and archaeologists like

Dickeson, who began excavating the mounds that covered their adopted homeland and

collecting the objects unearthed in these endless layers of earth.35

!

e eventual visualrepresentation of the sites and objects studied, as in the Egan-Dickeson panorama or in a

more conventional media such as print, may also be seen as participating in this discourse

on national history, as they aestheticized not only the land but time, reordering the way

their publics would conceive of Americas temporal and historical position.36 !erefore,

within the panorama itself, the interspersing of the representations of the mounds with

the depictions of historical events and local episodes can be interpreted as a desire to

enfold the ancient sites, and the histories they imply, into a proper American history.

But if Egan and Dickesons disregard for chronology in the structuring of the

dioramas scenes is indeed justified as a kind of inclusive embrace of history in all its

forms, then what do we make of the linear sequencing of time implied in the excavation

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28 Williams, 37.

29 Daniel J. Boorstin,e Americans:e National Experience(London: Phoenix Press, 1966), 369.

30 Boorstin, 3646.

31 Williams, 37.

32 !omas M. Allen,A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 151.

33 Ibid., 150.

34 Ibid., 1512.

35 Williams, 334.

36 Allen, 168.


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scene near the conclusion of the panorama? !e twentieth scene, described as the Huge

Mound and the Manner of Opening em, depicts the by-now familiar mounds scattered

over a marshy, lagoon-like landscape. !ese encircle at random a large mound under

exploration by a whole crew of men. Previously cloaked in grass and shrubs, the mounds

are now stripped of their protective layers and laid bare for the audience to see. In this

panel, then, mounds make the transition from awe-inspiring objects of contemplation to

scientific objects of analysis and tangible sources of knowledge. In addition to halting the

eye, the dramatic cross-section of the earthwork, placed front and centre, a"ords anunprecedented view into its stratified contents. Skeletons, pottery vessels, and tools are

revealed in the layers of rock and soil, whose textured, marbled aspect is depicted in

crude, imprecise cross-hatching. In fact, the unnaturalistic rendering of the strata gives

them a flat, two-dimensional quality, evocative of actual archaeological drawing. In Squier

and Daviss seminal work (mentioned earlier), monochromatic cross-sections of mounds

throughout the Mississippi Valley often appear, revealing the alternating igneous and

aqueous layers as artificial, that is, man-made, rather than deposited there through

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Fig. 2. John J. Egan, Huge Mound and the Manner of Opening them , ca. 1850. Distemper on cotton muslin.Courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust. Catalogue number: 34:1953.


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environmental processes.37 Regardless of their artificiality, the sequencing of rock still

implied a temporal process, in that the superimposition of layers translated into a linear

progression of time.38!e layers nearest to the apex of the mound, which enclose round

ceramic vessels, were the last to be installed, while those closest to the base, characterized

by a pattern of concentric half-circles, were the earliest to be laid, and thereby containedwhat might have been the older artifacts. But archaeological stratigraphy is far from an

infallible means of determining the age of objects as this section demonstrates: a pit was

dug up in the center of the mounds uppermost layers, and its skeletal contents cannot be

established as contemporaneous with either of the layers it sits between. Nevertheless,

representations of overlapping strata, whether artistic or graphical, in cross-section or

topographical views, may have helped the American public to imagine time extending

perpendicularly into the territory beneath the nation, according to Allen, thereby

planting the historical roots of the nation in the earth.39In the case of the mounds in the

panorama, the successive strata, saturated with years of human history, culminated

progressively in the uppermost layer at the surface, the new nation, forming only a

fraction of this vast repository of time.

To reiterate, the discovery of deep time had dramatically altered the history of

geology and the way individuals understood their relationship to land through time. !is

discovery created an opposition between two camps of thought, between linear and

circular visions of time, explains geological historian Stephen Jay Gould, who renames

each pole of the dichotomy as times arrow and times cycle, with the former metaphor

embodying the conception of time presupposed by stratification.40 Jay Goulds times

arrow is an idea of history as an irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events, wherein

each moment occupies its own distinct position in a temporal series, and all moments,considered in proper sequence, tell a story of linked events moving in a direction.41I have

previously mentioned that Angela Miller viewed the Dickeson-Egan panorama as

overwhelmingly preoccupied with the cycles of empire, and the nonlinear organization

of its scenes seemed to support that. I contend, however, that the underlying theme of the

diorama is a belief in the irreversibility of history and the unrepeatable uniqueness of

each step in a sequence of events linked through time in physical connectionnotions

which make up the essence of Goulds times arrow.42 With this view, the historical

moments represented by Egan take on a decisive quality and a specific position in time

and place from which they cannot be erased, while the visual dramatization of the mound

in landscape and under excavation is irreversible in the very mode of temporal, progressive

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37 Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis,Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley(150th AnniversaryReissue), ed. David J. Meltzer (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 143.

38 !e principles of stratigraphy had been laid out by geologists, and only by the later half of the eighteenthcentury were they appropriated by archaeology in order to date objects according to their relative position in theground. !is amalgamation of practices consequently meant that natural history and human history were one.See Alain Schnapp, Discovery of the Past(London: British Museum Press, 1996), 276.

39 Allen, 165.

40 Stephen Jay Gould, Times Arrow, Times Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time,(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), 910.

41 Gould, 11.

42 Ibid., 194.


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construction. Even the nature of the medium itself embodies this notion of time as

contingent and unpredictable, for each successive performance of the lecture and the

panorama is unrepeatable and unique. Moreover, the action of unrolling the painted

muslin itself signifies irreversibility in that once a section is exposed to the audience, it is

generally never returned to: for the duration of the presentation, only forward movementis possible.

Despite the fact that the layers of strata embody a vertical continuum of deep time

that seemingly conflicts with the horizontal unfolding of the panoramas tableaux, each

tableau follows the next in no semblance of chronological or geographical order,

encouraging us to read each as discrete from the next both in time and space. !e

experiential quality of the panorama implies a forward momentum that encourages an

additive reading. As suggested earlier, the emphatic and repeated depiction of mounds in

di"erent settings and contexts invests them with cultural and historical symbolism for

American viewers in search of a collective identity.

!is sequencing of time, however, does not compromise the quest for a national

past in which Dickeson was actively involved, as an embrace of this notion does not

forcibly mean turning ones back on the past, but rather understanding the past as made

of distinct episodes with a causal impact on a contingent history.43 Indeed, the

excavation scene, with its foreground abuzz with activity, e"ectively imagines a communal

investment in a national past. In front and on top of the central mound, black slaves,

attired in striped uniforms and straw hats, clear its base with shovels and pickaxes.

Meanwhile the other male figures, among them Dickeson himself, look upon the mound,

taking notes or sketching, and generally supervising the work carried out by the men. !e

fruits of their toil thus far are shown pressed against the foreground: a few vases andbowls with painted motifs lie haphazardly atop the growing piles of earth, rock, broken

branches, and roots. In the middle foreground and extending out into the distance, we can

spot the European American visitors to the site, who stroll about this marshy landscape

freely, some inspecting the artifacts and others taking in the view of the mounds beyond,

dispersed among neighbouring low-lying islands. !e presence of visitors is implied by

the minuscule white, blue, yellow, and pink dots, standing out from the khaki and beige

tones of the landscape, appearing at the base of the huge mounds in the distance. !eir

movementsthat is their hunger to touch, see, and stand beside these enormous

earthworksto some extent mimic the activities of Dickesons audience; for they, too,

would have been able to see (and perhaps handle) some of these artifacts, assembled byDickeson in a cabinet. Gazing at them firsthand, the audience member may have been

able to link them to their original context, and to the processes involved in collecting

them. !us, the panorama, coupled with the display of ancient objects and Dickesons

first-person narrative, may have impelled its spectators to participate and join the ranks of

tourists in communing with the remnants of prehistoric American civilization.

In fact, archaeological historian Robert Dunnell notes that following the

publication of Squier and DavissAncient Monumentsand similar archaeological findings,

Rachael Lew

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43 Gould, 11.


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a national interest in reporting archaeological phenomena grew. 44 !e Smithsonian

Institution soon became the repository of citizen reports of antiquities throughout the

nineteenth century. !erefore, there is some possibility that Dickeson and Egans moving

panorama contributed to the development of this national activity, by first proposing a

sense of a national past, and anchoring it in the ancient mounds of the Mississippi andOhio River Valleys. !e mounds themselves incarnated the relatively new concept of deep

time that had captured the interest of intellectual and scientific communities, allowing

many Americans to forge a connection to the land and nature itself through the lens of

time. By borrowing from landscape art conventions, Egan succeeded in naturalizing and

historicizing the mounds scattered about the region, making them appear as constants in

an ever-changing environment marked by technological development and extensive

settlement. Furthermore, the precisely rendered archaeological cross-section, appropriated

from scientific documentation, suggested an alternate way of understanding time, which,

interestingly, evoked the temporal and spatial experience of viewing the panorama itself.

In brief, in the dark amphitheatres in which the panorama was unrolled beneath gas

lighting, curious audience members were invited to meditate on their own relationship to

time as making up only a minuscule portion of the American continents expansive

human and geological history.

UBCUJAH | 2011

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44 Dunnell, 22.

digging up a national past, by rachel lew

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