Landscapes of Memory and Presence in the Canadian Shield (original) (raw)
Related papers
Canadian Shield rock art as Gesamtkunstwerk: Aesthetics of place and landscape
Global Rock Art. Annals of the XIV World Congress of the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations, Piauí, Brazil, 2010
Thousands of red ochre images and hundreds of carvings grace the cliffs and outcrops of a vast territory stretching from Québec to Saskatchewan. Aesthetic qualities in Canadian Shield rock art have rarely been addressed however, Canadian Shield rock art offers a great potential for study as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ethos of a holistic approach to existence and of the importance of relationships espoused by North American Indigenous people is reflected in their aesthetics where forms of visual expression are fully realized when being part of an embodied performance with spiritual connotations, where the functional and the beautiful co-exist. The aesthetic value of rock art is apprehended within its landscape context, where rock art can be experienced and where it can fulfill itself ritually. The aesthetic experience of rock art stems from the location of the images within the landscape, thus the properties of the surrounding landscape, as well as those of the rock outcrop (such as quartz veins and calcite/ silica precipitate deposits), as well as from the visual and acoustic properties encountered at the sites (such as shimmering light reflecting from water surface onto the cliffs or echo effects). All these characteristics carry spiritual associations and enhance the ritual potential of rock art sites while creating an impact on those who view and experience the art.
One of the major challenges facing archaeologists and cultural heritage/ resource managers is how to better approach and understand concepts of significance and value of archaeological features (e.g. stone tools, rock art sites, pottery, stone arrangements, shell middens) in contemporary Indigenous settings. In this article, I focus on exploring contemporary Indigenous engagement and interaction with one specific type of archaeological feature—rock art—to develop a better understanding of how significance and value are attributed to sites and motifs. Through the lens of affectual, relational, and cultural understandings of rock art in northern Australia and the American Southwest I examine the complex nature of encounters and responses (e.g. verbal and gestural) to sites and motifs to illustrate how concerns with significance go beyond the archaeological realm. Using Gell's (1992 The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, pp. 40–67. Claren-don Press, Oxford) ideas of agency and affect as a starting point, and then unpacking the responses that are elicited from visiting or viewing rock art, I focus on investigating the structure of the relationship between people and the contemporary social significance of archaeological features. A key outcome from this research is the realization that contemporary engagement with rock art is diverse and can be shaped by a variety of factors including ontological and epistemological understandings, emotional experiences (e.g. fear), social memory, and the health and well-being of individuals and communities.
Engaging Archaeology: 25 Case Studies in Research and Practice, 2018
Since the summer of 1998, I have conducted archaeological research in the Lake of the Woods region of northwestern Ontario, Canada. The area is rich in Indigenous rock paintings dating back potentially thousands of years. These sites and the contemporary Indigenous communities that continue to engage them remain central to the broader research that I do, which focuses on the relationships that past and present Indigenous peoples have with their natural and social landscapes. In recent rock art studies, landscape has become a common focus, moving beyond traditional studies that only examine the meaning of images and compositions of rock paintings towards a consideration of these sites as part of larger created social landscapes. In this chapter, I focus primarily on the rock art research I undertook between 2000 and 2005.
Cultural Markings on the Landscape
This dissertation explores the archaeological context of the PCN (Pecked Curvilinear Nucleated) tradition of marking boulders as it appears in the landscape of the Coastal Ranges of Northern California. Located on the over 2150 hectare property of the University of California Hopland Research and Extension Center (HREC) are five boulders or clusters of boulders that exhibit cultural markings, including some cupules, which were placed in the distant past on a specific type of boulder, in distinctive shapes and forms. By using a landscape archaeology and ritual theory framework, I explore the pre-historic activities that took place at the more than 30 identified pre-historic sites, through the archaeological context provided by more than 3000 catalogued artifacts excavated and collected from the sites. After subjecting the data to various technological methods, the results of various archaeological testing (obsidian hydration, chemical sourcing, AMS dates, soil testing techniques, and recording techniques) are reported, discussed and interpreted. A final objective and contribution of this study is to present a contextual model for application to similar archaeological sites.
Explorations in social memory - rock art, landscape and the reuse of place
Recent rock art research has provided new perspectives on the meaning of rock art, particularly in relation to religion, ritual, and cosmology. In this paper, I will explore yet another perspective, the concept of social memory in relation to rock art, based on two case studies from West Norway and Central Norway
The Creation and Endurance of Memory and Place Among First Nations of Northwestern Ontario, Canada.
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2012
Examinations of rock art typically focus on acts of creation and compositional meaning, with little attention paid to the position of these created places in the palimpsest of history. As these sites endure, their recognition and importance within subsequent social developments, including memory and oral tradition, are both invented and reinvented as descendant populations become established or as new populations move in displacing or replacing the makers. This paper examines the ways in which oral histories of historic and contemporary First Nations populations in northwestern Ontario, Canada, challenge standard understandings of rock-art in the region, taking these sites out of the maker/meaning context and placing them within a framework of user/caretaker. The results of this contextual shift contest notions of applied cultural affiliation and traditional ownership, resulting in a perspective that reveals a transgenerational and transcultural endurance of these places in the contemporary social memory of these Indigenous communities.