Building the Dawnland: Toward an Architectural History of Hunter-Gatherers on the Maritime Peninsula

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.

Architectural history relies on the idea that the human-built environment reflects and reinforces cultural ideas about how people view the world. Architecture therefore permits cultural changes to be tracked through time. Despite this, a literature review of past considerations of hunter-gatherer-built environments reveals remarkably little interest in approaching them through a lens of architectural history. Rather, a couple of contrary themes emerge: that hunter-gatherer architecture is so ephemeral that the traces it leaves on the landscape elude study and that hunter-gatherers don’t really produce houses at all—they make shelters, the shapes of which are more or less dictated by environmental realities. In this paper, I begin to consider an architectural history on the Maritime Peninsula: how Wabanaki people built their homelands as an historical process, contextualizing historic accounts of Wabanaki wigwams as forms of persistence and resistance against colonialism and a way to maintain mobility and identity.

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): 30926