Overview
Multispecies Entanglements in Great Lakes Agricultural Landscapes, AD 1000-1300
by Lindi Masur (McMaster University)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lindi-Masur
Monday, December 4, 2023 in LR Wilson 1003, 2:30-4pm
*No pre-registration required
How did food producers, their crops, weedy plants, animals, and ancestors collectively construct cultural landscapes and local cuisine in the lower Great Lakes ca. AD 1000-1300? In this talk I present a case study featuring a small cluster of archaeological sites near Arkona, Ontario. I use paleoethnobotanical analysis of macrobotanical remains to critique previous interpretations of marginal maize cultivation by Western Basin communities at this time. With increased reliance on maize and the planting and tending of new fields, novel social relationships were catalyzed with plants such as staghorn sumac and bramble, and animals like deer. Even after abandonment, through the maintenance of connection to ancestral places, relic fields remain the setting for considering the agency of both human and more-than-human actors in the early Late Woodland.
Lindi Masur (PhD, University of Toronto) is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology. She previously held positions as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Sewanee: The University of the South, and a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections. Her research areas include plant-human interaction, paleoethnobotanical methods, environmental justice and sustainability, food sovereignty, Ontario archaeology and Andean archaeology.
Upcoming department colloquia to be announced.