Post-Doc, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
Thesis Title: Deyughnyonkwarakda – “At the Wood’s Edge”: The Development of the Iroquoian Village in Southern Ontario, A.D. 900-1500
About
My current research project is entitled 'Being and belonging: the politics of seventeenth-century Wendat bodily transactions.' Utilizing both historic accounts and archaeological materials, I’m exploring tensions between the named and placed Wendat individual, and the dispersal and assimilation of this individual into wider collective social entities. These themes are played out across a range of Wendat performative arenas, including mortuary ceremonialism, ritual violence, craft production, and representational artwork (e.g. in effigy smoking pipes), in ways that are not always wholly coherent with a single model of ‘personhood’. This raises important questions about our tendency to seek uniform models (often simplistically opposed with those of western modernity) for past ways of ‘being-in-the-world’. It may be more productive for archaeologists to consider the conflicting experiences of the body that arise in an array of distinctive genres of practice, and the manner in which resulting tensions are worked out in a variety of contexts.
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