The Conscious Midden: An Indigenous Ontological Approach to Mound Building, Environmental Sustainability, and Other-Than-Human Selfhood in the Pacific Northwest Coast Salish Sea

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Salish Sea is a region speckled with coastal shell mounds. Often these places are the remnants of winter villages occupied over generations. Mounds were built with intention and foresight to leach nutrients into the surrounding ecosystem, sustaining the environment for generations. Millennia ago, Indigenous peoples understood through transgenerational knowledge how these features contribute to the renewal of beings—or, what contemporary western science colloquially calls Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Some shell middens were understood as conscious and composed of beings that agreed to being caught/harvested. In taking an ontological approach to mounds, we utilize ethnographic and archaeological data to explore human-environment relationships and the role of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge. Grounded in perspectivism and an ecology of selves, this approach allows for a deeper understanding of selfhood among other-than-human beings, the relational association of beings in mounds, and the larger ethos of environmental sustainability. This paper is also a critical call to protect conscious middens from accelerated erosion due to climate change and the onset of harsher winter storms. Preserving conscious middens thus extends beyond the realm of archaeological preservation; rather, it is tantamount to conserving ecosystems and biodiversity, and reflects a renewed relationship with the diverse beings of the Salish Sea.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39770.0