Digging up a National Past:

Archaeology and Landscape in the Construction of

History in John Egan and Dr. Dickesons Panorama of
the 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 rst 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 Te Lotus, a Philadelphia periodical.
3

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1 Bertha L. Heilbron, A Mississippi Panorama, Minnesota History 23, no. 4 (Dec. 1942): 353.
2 In an 1848 notebook entry, Dickeson rhetorically demanded, But who shall tell the era of the origin of
these venerable earth heaps! !e race of their builders, the purpose of their erection, the thousand circumstances
attending their rise, history, and desertionwhy now so lonely and desolate? M.W. Dickeson, Catalog of Stone
and Terra Cotta Implements and Ornaments of the North American Mound Builders (1848), Dickeson
Collection, University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, Philadelphia, quoted in Richard Veit, Mastodons,
Mound Builders, and Montroville Wilson Dickeson-Pioneering American Archaeologist, Expedition 41, no. 3
(November 1999): 20.
3 Heilbron, 352.
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 ndings
directly to the public and not through an institutional intermediary.
4
Perhaps that is why
Dickesons choice of a popular visual medium, the panorama, seems such an
unconventional means of presenting archaeological ndings to an audience. !e
associations of showmanship and popular appeal which accompany the panorama appear
to clash with the seemingly scholarly tone of scientic 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 seeks to 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.
6
Each end of this 2 x 106 metre-long
painting was attached to a mechanically driven upright cylinder, so that only one section
of 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,
8
and 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-ve 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, Te 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, Te 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 and
three nights of travel into a one to two hour presentation. See Oettermann, 326.
Ohio and Louisiana along with present-day Indian life are interspersed with specic
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, ipping 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.
11
Typically
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.
13
She 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 ancient
people 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
Rachael Lew
3
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: Temes 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. Art
and Life Along the Mississippi River 1850-1861, ed. J. T. Busch et al. (Minneapolis: !e Minneapolis Institute of
Arts, 2004), 56.
13 Angela Miller, !e Soil of an Unknown America: New World Lost Empires and the Debate over
Cultural Origins, American Art 8, 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-century
America, one expansionist, and the other an agrarian model of stable settlement. !e formers adherents justied
their decimation of American Indians with this myth, while the latters followers identied with what they
believed 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, Fantastic
Archaeology: the Wild Side of North American Prehistory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 43.
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 reective and
constitutive of this myth.
16
Although Millers work has been signicant in constructing a social and political
context 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.
17
Certainly
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
ctionalized 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 was
progressively 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 mound
group, with one pointing directly to the site, beckoning his companion to lookinstead,
the feathered gures 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 this
myth, particularly in passages where the haunting presence of the Indians in the margins of the landscape can be
read as a warning to Americans of the perils of imperial ambitions. See Miller, !e Soil of an Unknown
America, 11; 16.
17 Miller, !e Soil of an Unknown America, 18.
18 Lisa Lyons, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, in Te River: Images of
the Mississippi, ed. M. Friedman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre, 1976), 32.
19 Born, 96.
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 gures of the Ojibwe organized in the
foreground.
!is spatial organization, which positions the viewer at the summit of a hillock, in a
foreground lled 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
Rachael Lew
5
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 America 59, no. 6 (Nov.Dec. 1971): 58.
Fig. 1. John J. Egan, Marietta Ancient Fortifcation: A Grand View of their Walls, Bastions, Ramparts, and Fossa,
with the Relics Terein Found, ca. 1850. Distemper on cotton muslin. Courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza
McMillan Trust. Catalogue number: 34:1953.
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 rst 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 signicant 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 the rectangular enclosures.
With their di"erent rounded or attened 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 obstructing
any 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.
23
As present-day Indians
are occupied with shing, a bright rainbow pierces through a cloud-lled 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 mounds
with 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 in
which the planar delineation of space was accomplished along temporal lines that supported a reading of the
conquest of nature for social and economic usage. See Te 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: Archaeological
Syntheses from the Lower Mississippi River Valley, eds. J. Ra"erty and E. Peacock (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2008), 21.
23 All scene titles are based on the list in a surviving handbill advertising Dickesons exhibition of the
panorama. See Heilbron, 351.
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 still
prominently 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 gures, 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 rmly 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 remnants
of 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 be
seen 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
Rachael Lew
7
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.
understood in terms of state and local a#liations.
28
Historian 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,
30
Williams 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.
31
One 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.
32
Allen 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 an alternative
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 of a 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 visual
representation 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 justied 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, Te Americans: Te 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.
scene near the conclusion of the panorama? !e twentieth scene, described as the Huge
Mound and the Manner of Opening Tem, 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
scientic 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 an
unprecedented view into its stratied 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 at, 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 articial, that is, man-made, rather than deposited there through
Rachael Lew
9
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.
environmental processes.
37
Regardless of their articiality, 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 contained
what 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.
39
In 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 stratication.
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.
41
I 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 specic 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 Anniversary
Reissue), 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 eighteenth
century were they appropriated by archaeology in order to date objects according to their relative position in the
ground. !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.
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 signies 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 movement
is possible.
Despite the fact that the layers of strata embody a vertical continuum of deep time
that seemingly conicts 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 gures, 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 and
bowls 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 by
Dickeson in a cabinet. Gazing at them rsthand, 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
rst-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 Daviss Ancient Monuments and similar archaeological ndings,
Rachael Lew
11
43 Gould, 11.
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 rst proposing a
sense of a national past, and anchoring it in the ancient mounds of the Mississippi and
Ohio River Valleys. !e mounds themselves incarnated the relatively new concept of deep
time that had captured the interest of intellectual and scientic 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 scientic 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.