What can the mounds of North America—from temples to landfills—tell us about the history of settlement and the anthropogenic condition we inhabit today?

Symposium

A vast network of pre-European Native American mounds covers the North American continent. Alongside these temple, effigy and burial mounds that stand witness to millennia of settlement are the mounds of our present day: slag heaps, landfills, and sundry detritus of an anthropogenic landscape that we make when we don´t think about making landscapes. The project “Significant and Insignificant Mounds” aims to tell history from the mounds perspective, thus complicating our understanding of authenticity, meaning, and form.