Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Some Observations on Petrographic Indicators of Residential Mobility Patterns in Canadian Great Lakes and Arctic Regions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The manufacture and consumption of material goods by households and communities is shaped significantly by residential mobility patterns, and the reasons why people moved around the landscape in the past are as varied, as they are today. A variety of kinds of mobility have been recognized in the archaeological record, ranging from household relocations to the seasonal or cyclical movements of hunter-gather and herder groups over long and/or short distances, to large scale population migrations. These movements of people, objects and ideas shaped daily life and practice. A nuanced understanding of the material manifestations of different kinds of mobility is required to unravel how they did. Petrographic studies and pottery assemblages offer a means of recognizing and tracing the movement of objects and people, through the identification of raw material source locations on the geologic landscape. This paper compares the petrographic evidence of different kinds of mobility, drawing on examples from the Great Lakes and Arctic regions of Canada. It illustrates the kinds of insight that can be gained into resource use and the timing and seasonality of pottery production and people’s movement, and discusses how mobility patterns affect the conceptualization and interpretation of local production.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26097