Many archaeologists recognize a need for a more proactive archaeology, one that is responsive to the goals of communities and so one that carries the potential to advance restorative justice and reclamation. But this work requires shifts in time and resources. Such high-investment community archaeology comes with unfolding developments, or cascade effects. We frame positive ones as including finding, honoring, elevating, and protecting cultural heritage and suggest these may offer those grappling with accommodating such shifts practical examples of the benefits. Our example comes from the Great Bay Archaeological Survey (GBAS) focused on colonial New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok (ca. AD 1600–1780). With years of community engagement in place, a landowner had heard of GBAS and stopped development when he noticed large stones. Here, we found an early colonial homestead site, the Meserve Garrison, and our attendant research traced out a trajectory of colonial expansion from Indigenous homelands transformed into English property, property into intergenerational wealth. With rising wealth came the dispossession of labor; GBAS found enslaved (freed) Africans lived in this rural northern New England frontier, a place not typically associated with chattel slavery. We are working to protect the site and publicly commemorate and restore an accurate, inclusive, colonial history.

In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the construction of social memory, history, identity and heritage. Through a focus on processes of forgetting, this discussion offers a new set of interpretations of early colonial Sylvester Manor, a 17th-century plantation site in coastal New York. More specifically, the construction of racial categories over several centuries implicates social memory and forgetting, and introduces issues to the manner in which we remember the site where people of European, African and Native American ancestry met. This analysis views memory and forgetting not only as historical vectors in racialization, but also as factors in current identity politics.