Distributed Evidence
Year: 2012
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This project maps a series of boulders that were plucked, transported, and deposited by the toe-line of the retreating Late-Wisconsin and pre-Wisconsin ice sheets in North America and subsequently named, relocated, modified, and celebrated by people. They are the glacially distributed sites of council meetings, picnics, political movements, and territorial markers. They are inscribed with discrepant personal, regional, and national narratives and at the same time they declare their foreign origin through their conspicuous mineral composition and form. In the mid-19th century such boulders served as critical evidence for piecing together a theory of glaciation, and consequently an idea of geologic time and the location of humans within it. While their scientific importance waned in the 20th century, outside and along-side geology they are critical objects for reflections on time and space of various scales and consequences. They refer simultaneously to different moments in time: their geogenic forma-tion, their glacial deposition, and specific events in cultural history, as they are sometimes literally carved with a date. They are heavy, insistent markers in space, yet they indicate a remote origin—and therefore the journey between two sites—and they continue to be moved or changed by ensuing human forces. The naming, photographing, and feting of the boulders collated and mapped here signal their role as persistent devices for locating deep time within the present and grappling with the continuum of geological and human action.
Source: Punctum Books
Author: Jane Hutton
Institutions: Harvard University, University of Waterloo
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410045708