Ancient Wolastoq'kew landscapes
Subtitle: settlement and technology in the lower Saint John River valley, Canada.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 519
Description: Although mobility has been integral to the Wolastoqiyik in the recent past, the nature of pre-contact mobility in the lower Saint John River remains unclear. Mobility and settlement, while articulated as a theme in regional cultural history, are unevenly described in terms of archaeological data. Furthermore, we have rarely explored the link between mobility and technology, transportation and communication.This set of loosely integrated ideas forms the conceptual substrate for this research. Although it may be unrealistic to expect to weave such broad themes into a congruous whole, I will explore connections between these ideas and archaeological patterning in the Maritime Peninsula. Key to this exploration is a critical and frank evaluation of mobility and space. How can we explore the notion of territories and catchments? What is the relationship between the construction of spatial units, archaeological patterning, and actual groups of people in the past? How did people move within these units of space? How did these movements through space constrain or interact with other aspects of the archaeological record? How permeable were the edges of these units, and how did people, ideas and objects move through them?Recent archaeological approaches have expanded on notions of mobility. Most of these expansions involve pursuing the imagined implications of mobility for other aspects of material behaviour. In particular, mobility is thought to be particularly influential on the intensity of the extraction of particular suites of resources, and the technologies that are developed to carry out these tasks. As a result, many archaeologists have explored models that weigh possible costs and benefits of tool size, flexibility and labour requirements. This focus on material behaviour, however, has been at the expense of social and ideological behaviour. While we might equally envisage the impact of greater or lesser local (intra-territorial) mobility on regional (or inter-territorial) mobility, considerably less time has been devoted to contemplation of what these mean in behavioural terms.Although these questions are germane to the whole of the Maritime Peninsula, and indeed to the archaeology of the greater Northeast, I will explore them in the context of a series of sites and components in the lower Saint John River valley. These offer a chronologically and spatially circumscribed data base with which we can test our expectations about hunter-gatherer mobility and settlement in a refined and explicit manner. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Notes: Adviser:  E. Banning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1833.