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Introduction

From sketch maps to USGS topographic maps, archaeologists have long been dependent on creating and using two dimensional maps to record, analyze, and represent archaeological and historical phenomena. Arbitrary boundaries are drawn around the material activities of the past, spatially and temporally partitioning the landscape into archaeological sites and cultures.

Mapped boundaries and labels are powerful tools; they don’t simply describe or represent, but shape and inform our understandings and interpretations of past peoples, places, practices, and things, bounding them as entities. 

This exhibit explores how otherness has been literally and figuratively mapped onto the Indiana landscape by examining how the Native American settlement of Indiana and eventual removal of Native peoples was visually depicted on historic maps housed at the GBL. How were ideas of Native Americans as “other” and eventual “outsider” constructed, recorded, and reinforced through EuroAmerican representations of the Indiana landscape? How was difference understood, essentialized, and reified by EuroAmerican boundaries and borders? 

Introduction