I have a couple of powerful places that seemed to pierce the tough anthropology nerd shell and move me with the awesomeness of history.

The first is the slave depot/market in Charlestown, South Carolina. I was a kid, I need to return as an adult, but I was completely floored by the construction and purpose of a place dedicated to offloading and selling humans. At the time there wasn't much interpretation, they just let you walk through the area, which made for a larger impact as the gravity of the place silenced our group.

Next, I love the Salinas Missions in New Mexico (seriously you should visit) and the petroglyphs at El Moro (visit there, too), but I stumbled on one of my favorite New Mexico places by accident, and possibly by trespassing. While searching for geocaches my friend and I climbed a mesa near Jemez Pueblo. At the top we found fortifications and later learned this was a site of a large battle during de Vargas's "bloodless" reconquest of New Mexico following the Pueblo Revolt. The way the battle unfolded was written into the landscape. De Vargas and the bulk of the Spanish troops came up the easy way, we hiked nearly their exact path by accident, and that main force faced tough resistance throughout. A group of Native allies scaled the much steeper western slope to take the defenders by surprise, ending the resistance. The experience of standing on that mesa, thinking through the battle as a Jemez defender, or imagining a hail of arrows raining down on me as I hiked the Spanish approach, or that impossible western approach was amazing. That mesa really transformed my perspective on Native American resistance, revolt, and the negotiations of contact. I must stress my most sincere apologies to Jemez Pueblo if I was trespassing. Don't do what I did, kids.