Where Were the Children Learning? A Spatial Analysis of Childhood Potting Practices in Fifteenth-Century Great Lakes Villages

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Investigations of childhood practices in the Great Lakes have emerged through ceramic analysis and skill evaluations. This approach has been effective in tracing direct material interactions of potters and social relations within a communities of practice. However, there is less focus on potters and their relations to the village environment. Spatial analysis has been effective in understanding childhood practices in other spatiotemporal contexts, but there has been limited focus on Great Lakes childhood experiences. Through an analysis of artifact distribution, this paper investigate spatial interactions and their relation to learning experiences. I apply a distribution analysis of learner vessels from two mid to late fifteenth-century northern Iroquoian villages, Draper and Keffer, to evaluate the presence of learning areas and workshop spaces and to evaluate the spatial degree of freedom that children experienced in village spaces. I then construct object histories of learner artifacts to shed further light on childhood learning environments. The results lead me to suggest that children engaged in similar learning environments throughout the village and were not practicing in specialized workshop areas. A focus on village interactions leads to new questions relating to social learning and broader knowledge production practices in the Great Lakes region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32261