Algonquian Landscapes and Multispecies Archaeology in the Chesapeake

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological and ethnohistorical studies have begun to trace the ritualized practices of Native groups as they returned to places with deep histories throughout the Southeast during the colonial era. In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, Algonquian groups traveled across contested territories to bury ancestors, animals, and objects in places with long, precolonial occupations but no resident colonial-era population. This paper compares these colonial-era practices with the precolonial history of a site located near the James River that also lacked a yearlong residential population. Periodic visitation at the Hatch site produced a 400-year long record of human interments, dog burials, and feasting debris. Borrowing ideas from multispecies ethnography, this comparison considers the complicated and shifting entanglements between human lives and dogs, highlighting intersections between landscape, political economy, and cultural representations in the Algonquian Chesapeake.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25607