Situating the Pot and Potter: Ceramic Production and Use at the Silvercreek Sites, Two Early-Late Woodland Sites in Elgin County, Ontario

This study examines the pottery from two archaeological sites that date to the beginning of the early Late Woodland period. In order to understand the production and use of ceramic vessels at the sites, a wide range of ceramic attributes are recorded and analyzed. A second component of the research is to understand the settlement patterns at the site, in order to determine how space was organized at the sites. Through these analyses, I situate these sites within the wider context of southwestern Ontario in the 11th century A.D. I adopt a ‘communities of practice’ approach, and conclude that the similarities in ceramics throughout the Great Lakes during this time period can be seen as indicating high levels of social interaction, as well as overlapping communities of practice, in which potters may have moved across the landscape and continued their craft traditions in new communities

Keeping CRM Archaeology Relevant: Presenting an Archaeology of Children and Childhood in the Past

The industry of cultural resource management (CRM) has been criticized for its failure to communicate research results publicly, and to make contributions on a local and global scale. In this paper, I suggest that school-based archaeology programs – either through mock archaeological digs, participation in actual excavations, or the use of specific material culture types to tell stories about the past – provide a means to make CRM archaeology relevant to a wider audience. I also propose that an effective teaching tool about local archaeology would be to create a program on the archaeology of children and childhood. This would be an engaging method for teaching history, making history accessible and relatable, and helping students to understand past populations and change over time. CRM archaeologists would be well suited to present this unique and engaging program. Furthermore, this would present students with an opportunity to learn about the pre-European-contact period of North America, an area of history that many consider to be excluded from formal curriculum