Anna Foy, English / Humanities
On Sunday, April 28, 2024, members of Humanities 216, “The Classics and the Colonial Americas,” piled into a van outside Gailor Hall and traveled about five miles over bump, dirt roads into an isolated section of the Sewanee Domain now known as “King Farm.” Large portions of Sewanee’s 13,000 acres are now, or have never been, regularly inhabited by dense human communities. But King Farm—now itself uninhabited—reveals evidence of human habitation, or at least human presence, dating back some 10,000 years. Some of this evidence has been retrieved in archeological excavations of the soil, and of a homestead that once stood in a grove of maple trees and poplars. In addition, on the face of a nearby rock shelter, just above human height, a figure that experts believe was probably painted some 1000 years ago can be seen by those with a trained eye. (See the photo below, where John Willis has enhanced the image with a color filter.) We in Humanities 216 wanted to see this ancient image up close, and we wanted to see it in the environmental space in which it had so long persevered. So we asked Professor John Willis (History) to give us a tour. So a collection of interested students and their interested instructor (Professor Anna Foy, English and Humanities) spent several hours scrambling over rocks, examining the remnants of an old cow fence and an old well, admiring iron-laden springs, observing graffiti left by generations of Tennesseeans, and paying particular attention to this strange, ancient image, which has become faded enough that we had to squint and scrutinize it to make out its contours. King Farm, as documented by Professor Willis and other scholarly observers over many years, looks deserted now; but it has been shaped by intermittent generations of sustained human residence, including a period in the 1700s when Europeans ceded the property to the Cherokee by treaty, and also a period in the late 1800s when the property was owned and managed by Dennis Barnes and his family, formerly enslaved, who raised livestock for slaughter and sale after the Civil War. Our field trip contemplated these layers of human history, with an emphasis on the ethics and logistics of appreciating lasting signs of ancient indigenous life in America.
In doing so, we were continuing a semester-long contemplation of the role of “the ancients” in the education of colonial Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, and the further question of how we see studying the ancients as part of our education and cultural heritage today. There is a significant modern history of seeing the study of Greco-Roman writings and culture as the study of “the classics”—i.e., time-tested works of history and literature that are seen as an important component of Western Civilization. Humanities 216 looked at a starting point of this concept in the late colonial period, when an educated English speaker had to know Latin and some Greek merely to enter college, and when ancient Greco-Roman writings were prominent enough reference points that they served as evidence of the workability of republican government during the writing of the Constitution. Yet, before the Revolutionary period, most colonial writers did not yet talk of “the classics,” but of “the ancients”; and the category of “the ancients” included a much broader array of nationalities than later notions of “the classics” tended to presume. In the second half of the course, we investigated this difference in terminology—an interesting case in which the later term (“the classics”) really seems less inclusive or politically progressive than the earlier term (“the ancients”). Students were asked to do a creative assignment in which they located an ancient (pre-Christian) object or artifact or allusion on campus and then explored the ways that item had been honored, mocked, effaced, or obscured by later interpreters. Students then posted and discussed their findings, which included some Greco-Roman classics, but also lots of interesting examples beyond those nationalities. Our trip to the King Farm section of the Domain was, in a sense, a culmination of that experiment, with an emphasis on signs of ancient indigenous life on the Cumberland Plateau that remain somewhat hidden from Sewanee campus life.
We prepared for the field trip by reading Samson Occom’s petition to the U.S. Congress on behalf of the Brotherton Tribe (1785), whose references to the Hebrew Bible demonstrate an awareness of Occom’s sense that the “dominion” given by God to humankind over animals and plants had been unduly, misleadingly coopted by European colonizers. We also read a more recent essay called “Unnamed Caves” by a Sewanee alum, John Jeremiah Sullivan, about the thousands of years of indigenous peoples’ activities still evidenced on the Cumberland Plateau and variously known to other human inhabitants of the last 250 years.