Archaeological Landscapes during the 10–8 ka Lake Stanley Lowstand on the Alpena‐Amberley Ridge, Lake Huron

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136243/1/gea21590.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136243/2/gea21590_am.pd

Anthropological Archaeology Underwater: Hunting Architecture and Foraging Lifeways beneath the Great Lakes.

Hunter-gatherers are foundational to anthropology. Ethnographic accounts of foragers have been essential in building classic anthropological theories of human evolution, kinship, social organization, and religion. From these studies, a normative view of foragers as simple, highly mobile, egalitarian band societies with limited or no property/ownership, emerged and continues to be pervasive in the discipline. This larger issue frames the central problems addressed in this dissertation. It concerns hunter-gatherer societies and how they are effected by hunting architecture, such as drive lanes, animal corrals, and fishing weirs. These comparable built elements are found across time, space, and cultures because they are conditioned by similar traits in animal behavior. Subsistence strategies adopting such hunting features present a fundamental shift in exploitation by actively modifying the landscape (i.e. niche construction) to increase the yield and predictability of natural resources. It is argued that the creation and use of hunting architecture is among the most significant subsistence innovations in prehistory prior to the origins of agriculture; as similar to large-scale food production, the adoption of hunting architecture has demonstrable social and economic repercussions. This dissertation investigates the global phenomenon of hunting architecture by drawing on a regional case study – caribou hunting in the Great Lakes, where some of the oldest hunting structures (9,380-8,830 cal yr BP) have been submerged beneath Lake Huron. The preservation of a virtually unmodified, culturally engineered landscape underwater is an ideal laboratory for investigating broader issues. New underwater research conducted for this dissertation provides an unprecedented view of forager societies and hunting architecture in the past, problematizing our normative characterization of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Ultimately, this dissertation makes contributions to three core areas; the local archaeological problem of Great Lakes caribou hunters, the theoretical anthropological problem of hunting architecture and forager lifeways, and lastly, the global problem of conducting inundated archaeology. It provides a model for anthropological archaeology underwater and demonstrates that submerged prehistoric research can contribute to anthropology’s most significant questions.PHDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120823/1/aklemke_1.pd

Assessing the ability of the LAMAP predictive model to locate hunter-gatherer sites: An Alaskan case study

Evidence from archaeological sites and ancient and modern DNA suggests that people first entered northern North America via Beringia no later than 15,000 years ago, and potentially as early as 24,000 years ago. When people moved south to colonize the rest of the American continents is still debated. The presence of ice sheets means that two routes were the most likely: down the unglaciated coast of the Pacific Northwest, and/or via an interior route characterized as the ice-free corridor. Large areas of Late Pleistocene land on the coast were submerged when sea levels rose at the beginning of the Holocene, around 10,000 years ago, making it difficult to locate potentially early sites. There is now a need to develop and test methods that identify high potential locations for finding sites on those now-submerged landscapes. The LAMAP method (Carleton et al. 2012) has been successful in predicting areas of high archaeological potential associated with permanently occupied settlements of agrarian societies. This study is the first application of LAMAP to mobile hunter-gatherer sites. A study area was defined in the Tanana Valley, Alaska, and the location and age of known archaeological sites was sourced from files in the Alaska Heritage Resources Survey database. The location of each site was plotted on a raster map produced in QGIS using six Digital Elevation Models accessed from the USGS’s National Elevation Dataset. This provided information relating to six physical variables for each site: Elevation, Slope, Aspect, Distance to Drainage, Viewshed and Convexity. The study area was divided into more than 700 million cells. LAMAP calculates the similarity of each cell to the cells found in a 1-km sample area around each known site. Mapping the distribution of similarity indices created a map of archaeological potential. We ran LAMAP on 91 randomly selected site locations to create a map of archaeological potential, and tested it by examining the location of the second set of 91 sites from the study area. Areas of high archaeological potential contained more of the second set of sites, confirming LAMAP’s ability to predict high potential areas for mobile hunter-gatherer sites. A second analysis, using pre and post 10,000 cal BP sites, showed the same results, demonstrating that long-standing physical features of the landscape are robust predictors of high potential areas, regardless of the time period. LAMAP is one of a number of methods for modelling high potential areas, each of which has advantages and disadvantages, for the preliminary exploration of now-submerged terrestrial landscapes

Evaluating consumer-grade sonar for documenting inundated archaeological sites in Northwestern Ontario

This thesis assesses the application and effectiveness of consumer-grade sonar instruments for documenting inundated archaeological sites across Northwestern Ontario. Although the use of bathymetry and side scan sonar is commonly used by marine archaeologists, the acquisition of such data can be extremely costly, while also cumbersome in shallow water environments. Many Northwestern Ontario lakes and rivers have complicated histories involving both human-made and natural lake-level changes that have degraded and inundated shorelines containing archaeological resources. Four case studies throughout the Thunder Bay region were assessed using an inexpensive hull-mounted sonar system to test whether the instruments provide sufficient precision and resolution for further archaeological investigations

Investigating summer thermal stratification in Lake Ontario

Summer thermal stratification in Lake Ontario is simulated using the 3D hydrodynamic model Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code (EFDC). Summer temperature differences establish strong vertical density gradients (thermocline) between the epilimnion and hypolimnion. Capturing the stratification and thermocline formation has been a challenge in modeling Great Lakes. Deviating from EFDC's original Mellor-Yamada (1982) vertical mixing scheme, we have implemented an unidimensional vertical model that uses different eddy diffusivity formulations above and below the thermocline (Vincon-Leite, 1991; Vincon-Leite et al., 2014). The model is forced with the hourly meteorological data from weather stations around the lake, flow data for Niagara and St. Lawrence rivers; and lake bathymetry is interpolated on a 2-km grid. The model has 20 vertical layers following sigma vertical coordinates. Sensitivity of the model to vertical layers' spacing is thoroughly investigated. The model has been calibrated for appropriate solar radiation coefficients and horizontal mixing coefficients. Overall the new implemented diffusivity algorithm shows some successes in capturing the thermal stratification with RMSE values between 2-3°C. Calibration of vertical mixing coefficients is under investigation to capture the improved thermal stratification

Quantum Ecologies in Cosmological Infrastructures: A Critical Holographers Encounters with the Meta/Physics of Landscape-Laboratories

Quantum Ecologies interrogates the role of physics in the construction of an indifferent and disenchanted universe. It explores conceptual resonances within and between new materialism, Indigenous philosophy of place, science fiction, and art. Quantum Ecologies recognizes that the world is alive and wise and considers relevant modes of responsible address within and as the Earth. Through theoretical and historical analysis, site based research and a/v installation Quantum Ecologies has developed the heuristic of the ‘holographic’ as a way to attend to the multi-temporal, co-present, and multi-scalar pluralities and layers of knowing, agency, and landscape. This feminist, anti-colonial art-science framework for critically engaging (physics) sites and philosophies addresses the scientific cosmology of the West that (inadvertently) legitimates the exploitation, dispossession, and extraction of Earthly beings and bodies. Holography as critical interferometry is applied to experimental sites and assemblages known as ‘landscape-laboratories’ as a mode of both reading and (re)writing them. My field/work has taken place in remote environmentally protected sites that are entangled and instrumentalized as cosmological sensing arrays, experimental nuclear fusion energy, or dark matter particle physics laboratories in Russia, France, the UK, Germany, and Canada. By thinking through the strangeness of these planetary quantum assemblages alongside sciences inheritances and genealogies in magic, alchemy, and mysticism I argue for the necessity of ‘another science’ that is situated, compassionate, and responsible. Quantum Ecologies proposes a plural, poly-perspectival assessment of place, where accounting for the promiscuous more-than of materials, sites, forces, and energies is a necessary and continuous (re)configuring of meta/physics and respectful anti-colonial engagement with Land

A comprehensive survey on cultural algorithms

Peer reviewedPostprin

The Anishinaabeg of Chief\u27s Point

Contained on wax cylinders and lacquered aluminium discs, songs and stories are recorded by Robert and Elizabeth Thompson of Chief’s Point Indian Reserve #28. Not all recordings are considered sacred by the Anishinaabeg, instead the collection provides a broad range of topics including humour, the fur trade, plant medicine, and family history. Sometime before 1939, at the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Edwin Seaborn organized the production of 19 audio recordings. The March of Medicine in Western Ontario (1944) signaled to their creation by preserving the Saugeen Anishinaabeg oral tradition of the death of Tecumseh, a story that continues to live on within specific families at Saugeen First Nation #29. Through community-based research methods, evidenced through archival and artefact examinations, the story of the Anishinaabeg at Chief’s Point comes through this work. The voice of the land comes through the voices of the people cited within. A collaborative partnership with Museum London and Saugeen First Nation, the digitization of the audio collection was successfully completed. The songs and stories were repatriated to Saugeen and to other concerned communities through a series of community-driven presentations. The project was celebrated through the collaborative exhibition, The Voices of Chief’s Point (May to September 2018). The exhibit received the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation (2019). This represents the first historic compilation of the Anishinaabeg at Chief’s Point as no publications exist on this specific group of people until now

Embodied Landscapes: A Creation-Research Indigenous Métissage

Embodied Landscapes: A Creation-Research Indigenous Métissage (EL) is a self-study inquiry about identity and subjectivity fostered by the seed of my research journey of retrieving my Métis identity. It is a storying journey through entrenched notions of identity and identity politics in a Canadian colonial context. EL is a creation story that moves through the experiential forces of subjectivity by using a creation-based Indigenous métissage spiral (IM Spiral). This inquiry approach is rooted in Indigenous epistemologies and creative and literary research practices of poetic inquiry, métissage, and artmaking. I use my own photos, images, poems, and stories for weaving, mixing, and layering artistic assemblages. EL values knowledge embedded in and generated from experiences, memories, intuitions, dreams, visions, and ancestral wisdom, and recognizes being, as in-motion and relational. EL contains hyperlinks to a creative productionEmbodied Landscapes: Digital Exhibit (ELDE). The two components are synthesized through a métissage of embodied personal and sociopolitical complexities, challenges, and expression. Through discussion, presentation, and engagement with the viewer/reader, EL and ELDE reveal an approach to inquiry, living curriculum (Aoki, 2005), and pedagogy rooted in relationships and in ways of being, knowing, doing, and learning with/in creation itself. ELDE encompasses theories and methods that invoke an interplay among theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical frameworks. The Spiral sets in motion my Self evolution through forward, backward, inward, and outward movements, around and through realms of experience. This evokes a multi-textural dialogue propelling my being as an historical subject, a community member, a researcher, an artist, a poet, a teacher, and a Métis woman. Subjective experiences, memories, and reflections of my research journey culminate with emerging pedagogical values and are discussed in context of inspiriting the arts curriculum. This thesis addresses the contemporary Canadian controversy over Métis identity. It critically explores the role that subjectivity plays in identification, self-understanding, learning, and ways of being and living in the world. It offers a creation-research approach and a means of exploring Self as a site of inquiry

Sacred Civics

Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature. The book brings together transdisciplinary and global academics, professionals, and activists from a range of backgrounds to question assumptions that are fused deep into the code of how societies operate, and to draw on extraordinary wisdom from ancient Indigenous traditions; to social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the commons, and wellbeing economies; to technologies for participatory futures where people collaborate to reimagine and change culture. Looking at cities and human settlements as the sites of transformation, the book focuses on values, commons, and wisdom to demonstrate that how we choose to live together, to recognize interdependencies, to build, grow, create, and love—matters. Using multiple methodologies to integrate varied knowledge forms and practices, this truly ground-breaking volume includes contributions from renowned and rising voices. Sacred Civics is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectional discussions on social justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities, and future cities