John Creese | North Dakota State University (original) (raw)

Books by John Creese

∞ This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Papers by John Creese

Canadian Journal of Archaeology, 2018

MCJA Occasional Papers, 2018

In 2016, the Chequamegon Bay Archaeological Survey (CBAS) project initiated efforts to relocate a... more In 2016, the Chequamegon Bay Archaeological Survey (CBAS) project initiated efforts to relocate a historically documented multiethnic diaspora village attributed to Odawa and Wendat-Tionnantaté peoples who briefly settled near the shore of the bay circa 1661 to 1670. Investigations along the shore of Chequamegon Bay and the banks of Whittlesey and Fish Creeks, in Bayfield County, Wisconsin, produced no evidence of a seventeenth-century Native American habitation site. Our review of relevant historical sources found that the association of these two locales with Odawa and Wendat settlement is not based on firm archaeological or documentary evidence. We also found that both locales have been transformed by deforestation and subsequent erosion, lake-level rise, and heavy channel aggradation and sedimentation following Euro-American settlement. As a result, two different explanations for the negative findings at these sites are possible: (1) Neither locale was associated with seventeenth-century indigenous settlement, or (2) site locations are correct but are inundated and/or deeply buried beneath overburden. In spite of these ambiguous results, the project has stimulated an ongoing collaborative relationship with descendant communities and employed innovative field methods aimed at maintaining survey effectiveness while minimizing disturbance and honoring indigenous protocols of respect.

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2017

Can archaeology make sense of art 'after interpretation'? Post-human scholarship suggests that co... more Can archaeology make sense of art 'after interpretation'? Post-human scholarship suggests that conventional approaches to art, guided by Cartesian ontology, fail to account for the deeper kinship between things and thoughts. But the growing disillusionment with representation leaves art and the semiotic questions it raises in limbo. Can we recover an adequate social theory of art, semiosis and the subject in a post-humanist world? I submit that we can by building on Eduardo Kohn's thesis that life beyond the human is constitutively semiotic. Art, as a semiotic involution of life's animating processes, is form-taking and form-replicating activity. This form-taking is open-ended and prospective, continuously reaching beyond itself to refigure specific cases as general kinds. This occasions a process of emergence through which novel 'reals'-including societies and selves-are produced. Extending Sahlins' definition of kinship to include human/non-human relations, I argue that seventeenth-century Iroquoian art was about kinning-the making of relatives-and its power to form and reform relations of all sorts was central to its success.

Process and Meaning in Spatial Archaeology Investigations into Pre-Columbian Iroquoian Space and Place, 2017

In archaeology, emotion has often been thought to lie beyond the reach of responsible materialist... more In archaeology, emotion has often been thought to lie beyond the reach of responsible materialist scholarship. However, this study illustrates the central role of emotion in the formation of consensus-based political systems. In the Late Woodland longhouse societies of northeastern North America, political alliance-building depended on emotion work – elaborated interpersonal attentions in the form of grooming, bodily adornment, smoking and gift-giving that were intended to shift the affective character of relationships and satisfy deep personal desires. Emotion work depended heavily on material things – especially wampum beads and smoking pipes – that connected individual bodies with the body politic. A crucial part of the process of building and maintaining grassroots social collectives, emotion work produced historically particular forms of power and political subjectivity. These practices can be understood as a kind of corporeal politics, one with lasting consequences for indigenous sociopolitical development in eastern North America.

The Wendat Pipes Project ( WPP ) is a collaborative effort by researchers at the Universities of ... more The Wendat Pipes Project ( WPP ) is a collaborative effort by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Toronto. Since 2012, the WPP has been undertaking a wide-ranging analysis of a remarkable collection of Iroquoian smoking pipes from the fi fteenth-century Keffer site (AkGv-14) in south-central Ontario, Canada. The guiding theoretical orientation is an artifact "life history" or biographical approach inspired in particular by Igor Kopytoff's ( 1986 ) work on the social lives of things. The project seeks to understand all stages in the life history of fi red clay smoking pipes at Keffer, from production through use, exchange, recycling, breakage, and discard. The investigation combines traditional macroscopic attribute analysis and morphometrics with thinsection petrography and trace-element analysis of clay pastes (using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, or LA-ICP-MS).

A better understanding of the role of domestic dwellings in shaping past social relations is need... more A better understanding of the role of domestic dwellings in shaping past social relations is needed. Here, Northern Iroquoian longhouses are studied as sociotechnical systems, following Pfaffenberger (1992). This approach allows us to appreciate how social relations were generated and contested in the very activities of building and living in houses. I examine a sample of pre-Columbian longhouses from southern Ontario, Canada. Variation in aspects of house construction, spatial layout, and ritual indicates that sociotechnical networks associated with different houses were variable in scale, durability, and organization. What emerges is the sense that a dynamic, driving tension between forces of collectivization and atomization, inclusion and exclusion, lay at the heart of longhouse life.

This chapter explores how subjectivities are structured in identification practices. Effigy smok... more This chapter explores how subjectivities are structured in identification practices. Effigy smoking pipes from Eastern North America provide an intriguing case study. I argue that these objects functioned as specialized ‘technologies of attachment.’ The experiences of attachment-in-transcendence they conditioned were possible because they depended simultaneously on representational and relational-affective modes of identification. Operating together, these two identification modes served to reify a kind of subject in which the satisfaction and health of the inner self was realized in the moment of its relational attachment to another. The effigy images, which acted to conjure ‘cosmological others,’ reciprocally affirmed a transcendental ego-subject, permitting the co-production of subject and other that was the precondition of an effective somatic exchange. This powerful configuration bound up the emergence of an embodied subjectivity in the historically-particular affective exchanges that simultaneously articulated wider tribal institutions, such as lineages, clans, and polities.

Canadian Journal of Archaeology 37(2):185-218., 2013

This paper critically evaluates longstanding archaeological debates about the nature and conseque... more This paper critically evaluates longstanding archaeological debates about the nature and consequences of the early development of Northern Iroquoian village communities in southern Ontario. I argue that an adequate understanding of these developments depends on moving past debates over ethno-linguistic origins and degrees of sedentism, and toward a perspective that carefully traces people’s changing material engagements with their natural and built environments. This review suggests that Early Iroquoian villages were united by new kinds of generative entanglements with built space that can be understood as “place-making” practices. Early village place-making involved the architectural and ritual definition of enduring social groups—households and village communities—even as they maintained significant seasonal and logistic mobility across the landscape.

This article examines how personhood was shaped in the routine dispositional relations of longhou... more This article examines how personhood was shaped in the routine dispositional relations of longhouse life among the Iroquoian societies of eastern North America. Drawing on scholarship that situates the emergence of culturally-specific modes of personhood within relational networks of people and things, I present evidence that over seven centuries, a deep resonance developed between the ‘polyvalence’ of Iroquoian domestic spaces and a broadly ‘fractal’ (sensu Fowler 2004) or ‘part-in-whole’ sense of personhood in Iroquoian societies. An ethnohistoric review of seventeenth-century Ontario Iroquoian concepts of personhood is followed by an archaeological analysis of the development of longhouses between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. I report the results of a kernel density estimation (KDE) analysis of the spatial distribution of post and pit features across longhouse living floors in a diachronic study of 45 hearth areas. The results indicate that everyday practices within the longhouse came to follow several characteristic patterns by the mid-twelfth century ad. These patterns served to define ‘polyvalent’ relationships in which resident persons and nuclear families were at once identifiable as distinct social atoms and as inextricable components of larger hypostatic wholes — most especially house and lineage. A fundamental coherence was thereby established between the embodied experience of domestic taskscapes and a mode of personhood in which any social whole was understood as a dynamic and partible alliance of elements.

The archaeology of death in North America has been dominated by a concern for the way grave furni... more The archaeology of death in North America has been dominated by a concern for the way grave furnishings, bodily treatments, and monument construction reflect the identity or social standing of the deceased (e.g., Brown 1971; Carr and Case 2005). The result is a tendency to view mortuary practices as expressions of a social realty that existed before and beyond them. An alternative is to approach deathways as a vital creative field for the reconstitution of social orders – and the ideologies of body and person, community and cosmos that support them (e.g., Bloch and Parry 1982; Laneri 2007). My contribution explores how highly variable and heterogeneous mortuary practices were articulated to form a relatively uniform system during the Late Woodland period in the peninsula of southern Ontario. This process coincided with an episode of region-wide village coalescences, horticultural intensification, and rapid growth in the average size of houses. I suggest that the new mortuary system, by drawing existing practices into a programmatic whole that linked bodies first to individual biographies, and thence to the biographies of entire villages, constituted a potent force for institution-building in Iroquoian societies. The ritual treatment of bodies and personal belongings came to trace out a progression from structure to communitas – enfranchised person to uniform collective – that joined mortal individuals with immortal social wholes in a regenerative cycle. Historically-documented Iroquoian beliefs about the soul, afterlife, and reincarnation can be understood as doxa that emerged from of the work of mortuary dramas in defining and reproducing the foundational social institutions of early village life.

This paper examines the spatial configuration of two early 14th-century Woodland villages – one c... more This paper examines the spatial configuration of two early 14th-century Woodland villages – one composed of longhouses (Nodwell) and one, a ring-shaped arrangement of oval huts (Fort Hill). The contrasting spatial layouts of these sites are explored from the perspective of social interaction stress in early villages. Visibility Graph Analysis, a technique for analyzing the relational order of visual fields, is used to measure properties of spatial integration and control in these settlements over the course of their distinctive occupation histories. Results reveal “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” dispositions toward spatial order that influenced the routine use of settlement space, the nature of village growth, and arguably, long-term trajectories of community development in regional longhouse and ring-shaped traditions.

"Motor habit can be analyzed through “microvariables,” an archaeological method used to identify... more "Motor habit can be analyzed through “microvariables,” an archaeological
method used to identify the work of individual prehistoric potters.
Based on an experiment designed to test the premises on which this
method is based, I argue, contra Hill (1977), that motor- performance–related
attributes are quite sensitive to their social contexts of learning and
change over time. Individuals in two groups, a “social pressure” and an
“individualist” group, completed an incised design on wet clay plaques
on two occasions. Principal components analysis and discriminant analysis
provide strong support for the proposition that individual patterns of
motor performance are directly influenced by the social environment of
their acquisition."

"In this paper, I argue that the improper use of ethnohistorically derived models has caused arch... more "In this paper, I argue that the improper use of ethnohistorically derived models has caused archaeologists to overlook important evidence for how precontact Iroquoian longhouses were spatially organized. Kernel density estimation (KDE) analysis is applied here for the first time to identify characteristic distribution patterns of posts and pits about central hearths in a large diachronic sample of longhouse floors from southern Ontario. The results reveal a previously undocumented system of supporting architecture for houses in the region and a pattern of relative proxemic distances that was conserved for more than five centuries.

Dans cet article, l'auteur soutient que le mauvais usage des modèles ethnohistoriques a fait en sorte que les archéologues ont fermé les yeux sur beaucoup de données concernant l'organisation spatiale des maisons-longues iroquoiennes. Il a appliqué, pour la première fois, une analyse statistique utilisant la méthode d'estimation par noyau afin d'identifier des patterns de distribution des traces de piquet et des fosses autour des foyers centraux dans un grand échantillon diachronique de planchers de maisons-longues du sud de l'Ontario. Les résultats révèlent un système inédit de structures architecturales de support pour les maisons de la région, et un modèle de distances proxémiques qui a perduré sur plus de cinq siècles."

Journal of Social Archaeology, Jan 1, 2011

"This article explores how a relational ontology of landscape provides important insights into th... more "This article explores how a relational ontology of landscape provides important insights into the contexts and meanings of Northern Algonquian rock art of the Canadian Shield region. I propose that rock art emerged within and cemented a potent moral landscape that was experienced in terms of reciprocal relations between human and ‘other-than-human’ persons. Rather than counterposing dualities of natural and supernatural, this landscape was predicated on the flow of power between agencies in a relational and
intensely social universe."

This dissertation explores the origins and development of Northern Iroquoian village life in pres... more This dissertation explores the origins and development of Northern Iroquoian village life in present-day southern Ontario, from the first appearance of durable domestic architecture in the 10th century A.D., to the formation of large villages and towns in the 15th century A.D. Twentyfive extensively excavated village sites are analyzed in terms of the configuration of exterior and interior space, with a view to placing the social construction of community at the centre of the problem of early village development. Metric and space-syntax measures of the configuration of outdoor space reveal coordinated developments in the scale of houses and villages, their built densities, and the structure of exterior accessibility networks, that involved the emergence of a “local-to-global” pattern of order with village growth. Such a pattern, I argue, was experientially consonant with a sequential hierarchy of daily social encounters and interactions that was related to the development of factional groups. Within the longhouse, a similarly “nested” pattern of spatial order and associated social identities emerged early in the history of village development, but was elaborated and ritualized during the later 13th century as the longhouse became the primary body through which political alliances involving village coalescence were negotiated.

I suggest that the progressive extensification of collective social groups associated with longhouse expansions and village coalescences involved the development of “conjoint” personhood and power in a context of predominantly mutualistic village economies and enduring egalitarian ideals. The ritualization of domestic space during this process reveals that the continual production and extension of social group identities – such as the matrilineage – was contingent upon “social work” accomplished through an ongoing generative engagement with the built environment.

Reviews by John Creese

Drafts by John Creese

This essay is about rock art and ancestral agency -how certain rock art practices reproduce a 7 w... more This essay is about rock art and ancestral agency -how certain rock art practices reproduce a 7 world of ancestral presence and relationship for many First Nations people of North America, 8 historically and today. But, in making this argument, I wish to take a left fork off the well-beaten 9 path of constructivism in which a culturally-particular ontology is shown to be responsible for 10 the distinctive nature of the rock art -its form, its settings, and its practices. Pursuing an 11 alternate (no doubt more bumpy) track, I suggest that there is something more fundamental at 12 work in the way ancestral agency flows through rock art than explanations rooted in notions of 13 worldview would have it. Building on Norder's (2012) distinction between maker/meaning and 14 user/caretaker frameworks for interpreting the rock art of the Canadian Shield, I see the 15 user/caretaker model as symptomatic of a much broader set of relational knowledge practices 16 common to Indigenous peoples of the region (cf. Zawadzka 2019). Resisting the tendency to 17 explain these practices in terms of an off-the-shelf ontological model such as animism, I seek 18 instead to reframe the problem as one of understanding how certain routine forms of action and 19 attention shape emergent worlds -not just their perception or imagination by enculturated 20 subjects -but the worlds themselves. This leads to a definition of ontology as ontogeny -sets of 21 relations that tend to disclose (and foreclose) others within the self-transforming processes of 22 emergent assemblages. Three corollaries are that ontologies are: (1) endemic to particular 23 assemblages of practice; (2) inherently entangled with the actions and apparatuses of knowing; 24 and (3) moving targets, defined in particular ongoing relations of disclosure rather than in fixed states of being. Drawing on examples of rock art, stone cairns, and medicine wheels of the 1 Canadian Shield and Northern Plains, I show how a landscape of ancestral presence and agency 2 was realized (as opposed to merely perceived, imagined, or experienced) in particular modes and 3 media of action and attention. This, finally, leads to some conclusions about the value of 4

∞ This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Canadian Journal of Archaeology, 2018

MCJA Occasional Papers, 2018

In 2016, the Chequamegon Bay Archaeological Survey (CBAS) project initiated efforts to relocate a... more In 2016, the Chequamegon Bay Archaeological Survey (CBAS) project initiated efforts to relocate a historically documented multiethnic diaspora village attributed to Odawa and Wendat-Tionnantaté peoples who briefly settled near the shore of the bay circa 1661 to 1670. Investigations along the shore of Chequamegon Bay and the banks of Whittlesey and Fish Creeks, in Bayfield County, Wisconsin, produced no evidence of a seventeenth-century Native American habitation site. Our review of relevant historical sources found that the association of these two locales with Odawa and Wendat settlement is not based on firm archaeological or documentary evidence. We also found that both locales have been transformed by deforestation and subsequent erosion, lake-level rise, and heavy channel aggradation and sedimentation following Euro-American settlement. As a result, two different explanations for the negative findings at these sites are possible: (1) Neither locale was associated with seventeenth-century indigenous settlement, or (2) site locations are correct but are inundated and/or deeply buried beneath overburden. In spite of these ambiguous results, the project has stimulated an ongoing collaborative relationship with descendant communities and employed innovative field methods aimed at maintaining survey effectiveness while minimizing disturbance and honoring indigenous protocols of respect.

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2017

Can archaeology make sense of art 'after interpretation'? Post-human scholarship suggests that co... more Can archaeology make sense of art 'after interpretation'? Post-human scholarship suggests that conventional approaches to art, guided by Cartesian ontology, fail to account for the deeper kinship between things and thoughts. But the growing disillusionment with representation leaves art and the semiotic questions it raises in limbo. Can we recover an adequate social theory of art, semiosis and the subject in a post-humanist world? I submit that we can by building on Eduardo Kohn's thesis that life beyond the human is constitutively semiotic. Art, as a semiotic involution of life's animating processes, is form-taking and form-replicating activity. This form-taking is open-ended and prospective, continuously reaching beyond itself to refigure specific cases as general kinds. This occasions a process of emergence through which novel 'reals'-including societies and selves-are produced. Extending Sahlins' definition of kinship to include human/non-human relations, I argue that seventeenth-century Iroquoian art was about kinning-the making of relatives-and its power to form and reform relations of all sorts was central to its success.

Process and Meaning in Spatial Archaeology Investigations into Pre-Columbian Iroquoian Space and Place, 2017

In archaeology, emotion has often been thought to lie beyond the reach of responsible materialist... more In archaeology, emotion has often been thought to lie beyond the reach of responsible materialist scholarship. However, this study illustrates the central role of emotion in the formation of consensus-based political systems. In the Late Woodland longhouse societies of northeastern North America, political alliance-building depended on emotion work – elaborated interpersonal attentions in the form of grooming, bodily adornment, smoking and gift-giving that were intended to shift the affective character of relationships and satisfy deep personal desires. Emotion work depended heavily on material things – especially wampum beads and smoking pipes – that connected individual bodies with the body politic. A crucial part of the process of building and maintaining grassroots social collectives, emotion work produced historically particular forms of power and political subjectivity. These practices can be understood as a kind of corporeal politics, one with lasting consequences for indigenous sociopolitical development in eastern North America.

The Wendat Pipes Project ( WPP ) is a collaborative effort by researchers at the Universities of ... more The Wendat Pipes Project ( WPP ) is a collaborative effort by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Toronto. Since 2012, the WPP has been undertaking a wide-ranging analysis of a remarkable collection of Iroquoian smoking pipes from the fi fteenth-century Keffer site (AkGv-14) in south-central Ontario, Canada. The guiding theoretical orientation is an artifact "life history" or biographical approach inspired in particular by Igor Kopytoff's ( 1986 ) work on the social lives of things. The project seeks to understand all stages in the life history of fi red clay smoking pipes at Keffer, from production through use, exchange, recycling, breakage, and discard. The investigation combines traditional macroscopic attribute analysis and morphometrics with thinsection petrography and trace-element analysis of clay pastes (using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, or LA-ICP-MS).

A better understanding of the role of domestic dwellings in shaping past social relations is need... more A better understanding of the role of domestic dwellings in shaping past social relations is needed. Here, Northern Iroquoian longhouses are studied as sociotechnical systems, following Pfaffenberger (1992). This approach allows us to appreciate how social relations were generated and contested in the very activities of building and living in houses. I examine a sample of pre-Columbian longhouses from southern Ontario, Canada. Variation in aspects of house construction, spatial layout, and ritual indicates that sociotechnical networks associated with different houses were variable in scale, durability, and organization. What emerges is the sense that a dynamic, driving tension between forces of collectivization and atomization, inclusion and exclusion, lay at the heart of longhouse life.

This chapter explores how subjectivities are structured in identification practices. Effigy smok... more This chapter explores how subjectivities are structured in identification practices. Effigy smoking pipes from Eastern North America provide an intriguing case study. I argue that these objects functioned as specialized ‘technologies of attachment.’ The experiences of attachment-in-transcendence they conditioned were possible because they depended simultaneously on representational and relational-affective modes of identification. Operating together, these two identification modes served to reify a kind of subject in which the satisfaction and health of the inner self was realized in the moment of its relational attachment to another. The effigy images, which acted to conjure ‘cosmological others,’ reciprocally affirmed a transcendental ego-subject, permitting the co-production of subject and other that was the precondition of an effective somatic exchange. This powerful configuration bound up the emergence of an embodied subjectivity in the historically-particular affective exchanges that simultaneously articulated wider tribal institutions, such as lineages, clans, and polities.

Canadian Journal of Archaeology 37(2):185-218., 2013

This paper critically evaluates longstanding archaeological debates about the nature and conseque... more This paper critically evaluates longstanding archaeological debates about the nature and consequences of the early development of Northern Iroquoian village communities in southern Ontario. I argue that an adequate understanding of these developments depends on moving past debates over ethno-linguistic origins and degrees of sedentism, and toward a perspective that carefully traces people’s changing material engagements with their natural and built environments. This review suggests that Early Iroquoian villages were united by new kinds of generative entanglements with built space that can be understood as “place-making” practices. Early village place-making involved the architectural and ritual definition of enduring social groups—households and village communities—even as they maintained significant seasonal and logistic mobility across the landscape.

This article examines how personhood was shaped in the routine dispositional relations of longhou... more This article examines how personhood was shaped in the routine dispositional relations of longhouse life among the Iroquoian societies of eastern North America. Drawing on scholarship that situates the emergence of culturally-specific modes of personhood within relational networks of people and things, I present evidence that over seven centuries, a deep resonance developed between the ‘polyvalence’ of Iroquoian domestic spaces and a broadly ‘fractal’ (sensu Fowler 2004) or ‘part-in-whole’ sense of personhood in Iroquoian societies. An ethnohistoric review of seventeenth-century Ontario Iroquoian concepts of personhood is followed by an archaeological analysis of the development of longhouses between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. I report the results of a kernel density estimation (KDE) analysis of the spatial distribution of post and pit features across longhouse living floors in a diachronic study of 45 hearth areas. The results indicate that everyday practices within the longhouse came to follow several characteristic patterns by the mid-twelfth century ad. These patterns served to define ‘polyvalent’ relationships in which resident persons and nuclear families were at once identifiable as distinct social atoms and as inextricable components of larger hypostatic wholes — most especially house and lineage. A fundamental coherence was thereby established between the embodied experience of domestic taskscapes and a mode of personhood in which any social whole was understood as a dynamic and partible alliance of elements.

The archaeology of death in North America has been dominated by a concern for the way grave furni... more The archaeology of death in North America has been dominated by a concern for the way grave furnishings, bodily treatments, and monument construction reflect the identity or social standing of the deceased (e.g., Brown 1971; Carr and Case 2005). The result is a tendency to view mortuary practices as expressions of a social realty that existed before and beyond them. An alternative is to approach deathways as a vital creative field for the reconstitution of social orders – and the ideologies of body and person, community and cosmos that support them (e.g., Bloch and Parry 1982; Laneri 2007). My contribution explores how highly variable and heterogeneous mortuary practices were articulated to form a relatively uniform system during the Late Woodland period in the peninsula of southern Ontario. This process coincided with an episode of region-wide village coalescences, horticultural intensification, and rapid growth in the average size of houses. I suggest that the new mortuary system, by drawing existing practices into a programmatic whole that linked bodies first to individual biographies, and thence to the biographies of entire villages, constituted a potent force for institution-building in Iroquoian societies. The ritual treatment of bodies and personal belongings came to trace out a progression from structure to communitas – enfranchised person to uniform collective – that joined mortal individuals with immortal social wholes in a regenerative cycle. Historically-documented Iroquoian beliefs about the soul, afterlife, and reincarnation can be understood as doxa that emerged from of the work of mortuary dramas in defining and reproducing the foundational social institutions of early village life.

This paper examines the spatial configuration of two early 14th-century Woodland villages – one c... more This paper examines the spatial configuration of two early 14th-century Woodland villages – one composed of longhouses (Nodwell) and one, a ring-shaped arrangement of oval huts (Fort Hill). The contrasting spatial layouts of these sites are explored from the perspective of social interaction stress in early villages. Visibility Graph Analysis, a technique for analyzing the relational order of visual fields, is used to measure properties of spatial integration and control in these settlements over the course of their distinctive occupation histories. Results reveal “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” dispositions toward spatial order that influenced the routine use of settlement space, the nature of village growth, and arguably, long-term trajectories of community development in regional longhouse and ring-shaped traditions.

"Motor habit can be analyzed through “microvariables,” an archaeological method used to identify... more "Motor habit can be analyzed through “microvariables,” an archaeological
method used to identify the work of individual prehistoric potters.
Based on an experiment designed to test the premises on which this
method is based, I argue, contra Hill (1977), that motor- performance–related
attributes are quite sensitive to their social contexts of learning and
change over time. Individuals in two groups, a “social pressure” and an
“individualist” group, completed an incised design on wet clay plaques
on two occasions. Principal components analysis and discriminant analysis
provide strong support for the proposition that individual patterns of
motor performance are directly influenced by the social environment of
their acquisition."

"In this paper, I argue that the improper use of ethnohistorically derived models has caused arch... more "In this paper, I argue that the improper use of ethnohistorically derived models has caused archaeologists to overlook important evidence for how precontact Iroquoian longhouses were spatially organized. Kernel density estimation (KDE) analysis is applied here for the first time to identify characteristic distribution patterns of posts and pits about central hearths in a large diachronic sample of longhouse floors from southern Ontario. The results reveal a previously undocumented system of supporting architecture for houses in the region and a pattern of relative proxemic distances that was conserved for more than five centuries.

Dans cet article, l'auteur soutient que le mauvais usage des modèles ethnohistoriques a fait en sorte que les archéologues ont fermé les yeux sur beaucoup de données concernant l'organisation spatiale des maisons-longues iroquoiennes. Il a appliqué, pour la première fois, une analyse statistique utilisant la méthode d'estimation par noyau afin d'identifier des patterns de distribution des traces de piquet et des fosses autour des foyers centraux dans un grand échantillon diachronique de planchers de maisons-longues du sud de l'Ontario. Les résultats révèlent un système inédit de structures architecturales de support pour les maisons de la région, et un modèle de distances proxémiques qui a perduré sur plus de cinq siècles."

Journal of Social Archaeology, Jan 1, 2011

"This article explores how a relational ontology of landscape provides important insights into th... more "This article explores how a relational ontology of landscape provides important insights into the contexts and meanings of Northern Algonquian rock art of the Canadian Shield region. I propose that rock art emerged within and cemented a potent moral landscape that was experienced in terms of reciprocal relations between human and ‘other-than-human’ persons. Rather than counterposing dualities of natural and supernatural, this landscape was predicated on the flow of power between agencies in a relational and
intensely social universe."

This dissertation explores the origins and development of Northern Iroquoian village life in pres... more This dissertation explores the origins and development of Northern Iroquoian village life in present-day southern Ontario, from the first appearance of durable domestic architecture in the 10th century A.D., to the formation of large villages and towns in the 15th century A.D. Twentyfive extensively excavated village sites are analyzed in terms of the configuration of exterior and interior space, with a view to placing the social construction of community at the centre of the problem of early village development. Metric and space-syntax measures of the configuration of outdoor space reveal coordinated developments in the scale of houses and villages, their built densities, and the structure of exterior accessibility networks, that involved the emergence of a “local-to-global” pattern of order with village growth. Such a pattern, I argue, was experientially consonant with a sequential hierarchy of daily social encounters and interactions that was related to the development of factional groups. Within the longhouse, a similarly “nested” pattern of spatial order and associated social identities emerged early in the history of village development, but was elaborated and ritualized during the later 13th century as the longhouse became the primary body through which political alliances involving village coalescence were negotiated.

I suggest that the progressive extensification of collective social groups associated with longhouse expansions and village coalescences involved the development of “conjoint” personhood and power in a context of predominantly mutualistic village economies and enduring egalitarian ideals. The ritualization of domestic space during this process reveals that the continual production and extension of social group identities – such as the matrilineage – was contingent upon “social work” accomplished through an ongoing generative engagement with the built environment.

This essay is about rock art and ancestral agency -how certain rock art practices reproduce a 7 w... more This essay is about rock art and ancestral agency -how certain rock art practices reproduce a 7 world of ancestral presence and relationship for many First Nations people of North America, 8 historically and today. But, in making this argument, I wish to take a left fork off the well-beaten 9 path of constructivism in which a culturally-particular ontology is shown to be responsible for 10 the distinctive nature of the rock art -its form, its settings, and its practices. Pursuing an 11 alternate (no doubt more bumpy) track, I suggest that there is something more fundamental at 12 work in the way ancestral agency flows through rock art than explanations rooted in notions of 13 worldview would have it. Building on Norder's (2012) distinction between maker/meaning and 14 user/caretaker frameworks for interpreting the rock art of the Canadian Shield, I see the 15 user/caretaker model as symptomatic of a much broader set of relational knowledge practices 16 common to Indigenous peoples of the region (cf. Zawadzka 2019). Resisting the tendency to 17 explain these practices in terms of an off-the-shelf ontological model such as animism, I seek 18 instead to reframe the problem as one of understanding how certain routine forms of action and 19 attention shape emergent worlds -not just their perception or imagination by enculturated 20 subjects -but the worlds themselves. This leads to a definition of ontology as ontogeny -sets of 21 relations that tend to disclose (and foreclose) others within the self-transforming processes of 22 emergent assemblages. Three corollaries are that ontologies are: (1) endemic to particular 23 assemblages of practice; (2) inherently entangled with the actions and apparatuses of knowing; 24 and (3) moving targets, defined in particular ongoing relations of disclosure rather than in fixed states of being. Drawing on examples of rock art, stone cairns, and medicine wheels of the 1 Canadian Shield and Northern Plains, I show how a landscape of ancestral presence and agency 2 was realized (as opposed to merely perceived, imagined, or experienced) in particular modes and 3 media of action and attention. This, finally, leads to some conclusions about the value of 4