In 1923, rural New England mill town Dover, New Hampshire, staged a Tercentenary pageant of extraordinary proportions to celebrate its “first” settlement. This public spectacle memorialized a specific, and deeply exclusionary, narrative of English settler colonialism, shaped by social anxieties of the post-First World War United States. Recent archaeological research has found possible remnants from this spectacle on a seventeenth-century site. In disturbing this site, the Tercentenary pageant appears to have disregarded actual significant material traces from the very era it aimed to memorialize--traces that offer distinct, fuller understandings of deeply nuanced Native-settler interactions in the Piscataqua River region. Dover’s pageant is situated in a regional analysis of Native and Euro-colonial commemorative place-making of the early twentieth century, exploring how different communities pursued multivocal, monovocal, or other approaches in their performative engagements with the seventeenth century.

1923 年，新罕布什尔州新英格兰乡村磨坊小镇多佛举办了一场规模非凡的三百年庆典，以庆祝其“第一个”定居点。这一公共场面纪念了英国殖民者殖民主义的一种特殊的、极具排他性的叙事，这种叙事是由第一次世界大战后美国的社会焦虑所塑造的。最近的考古研究在 17 世纪的遗址上发现了这一奇观的可能遗迹。在扰乱这个遗址的过程中，三百年庆典似乎忽视了它旨在纪念的那个时代的实际重要物质痕迹——这些痕迹提供了对皮斯卡塔夸河地区土著居民与定居者之间细微差别的互动的独特、更全面的理解。