☛ From “Intricate, Tortuous, and Difficult Channel” to “Western Venice:” The Transformation of the St. Clair Maritime Landscape from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries

☛ Interpreting the Buffalo Lake Locality: Analysis of Projectile Point and Ceramic Assemblages Recovered from Kratz Creek (47MQ39), Neale (47MQ49), and McClaughry (47MQ42) Sites

 

Below are abstracts for masters theses and doctoral dissertations with relevance to Midwestern archaeology. Email us if you wish for us to consider posting the abstract of your completed masters thesis or doctoral dissertation.

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From “Intricate, Tortuous, and Difficult Channel” to “Western Venice:” The Transformation of the St. Clair Maritime Landscape from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries

By Daniel F. Harrison
Doctoral Dissertation Abstract
Wayne State University
April 2020

The St. Clair system—a river, delta and lake between Lake Huron and the Detroit River—offers significant opportunities to study long-term maritime landscape formation, and to preserve a unique resource. Few maritime landscapes in the Great Lakes remain so deeply and clearly inscribed by successive cultures. This permits both focused and comprehensive analyses and comparisons of the ideologies, technologies and practices of indigenous, colonial, and modern societies as each created its unique place in the environment through four processes: cognition, dwelling, movement, and representation. The socially conditioned perception of environmental resources and constraints, and resulting strategies to exploit the former while minimizing the latter, manifested in multiple forms. The diachronic anthropological study of maritime landscapes requires an interdisciplinary approach to such diverse evidence as place names, eyewitness accounts, maps, nautical practices, and material culture. Historical ecology offers the landscape anthropologist a flexible and inclusive theoretical and methodological toolkit, including multiple temporal frameworks, and the dialectical interaction of complex assemblages of agents. Five periods are posited: indigenous, French colonial, British colonial, post-colonial and modern. In each, culturally driven placemaking occurred through the interaction of the dominant society with its environment, and with predecessor societies. Resulting patterns of settlement, subsistence, movement, and representation produced a distinctive maritime landscape unique to each society and its period of dominance. Throughout the study period, however, a long-term pattern of maritime connectivity emerged, as the preponderance of agency gradually shifted from Nature, to an industrial maritime society capable of creating a built environment optimized for global waterborne transport. The once-convoluted channels of the St. Clair delta became a recreational mecca to nearby Detroit, earning it the nickname “America’s Venice.” The evolving material culture of maritime societies is quantitatively examined through choices made in local shipbuilding, while risk and failure is evidenced in the archaeological patterning of shipwrecks and their causes. Through “evidence-based storytelling,” the material culture of seafaring is reunited with local and national narratives, with the goal of recovering, interpreting and performing maritime heritage and identity through today’s descendant communities. 

Keywords: Great Lakes, maritime cultural landscape, historical ecology, Annales, maritime archaeology, shipwrecks, maritime heritage

 

Interpreting the Buffalo Lake Locality: Analysis of Projectile Point and Ceramic Assemblages Recovered from Kratz Creek (47MQ39), Neale (47MQ49), and McClaughry (47MQ42) Sites

By Seth Taft
Master of Science Thesis Abstract
St. Cloud State University
May 2020

This research comprises the analysis of artifacts recovered during archaeological investigations at Buffalo Lake in 1917 and 1925 at Kratz Creek (47MQ0039), Neale (47MQ0049), and McClaughry (47MQ0042) mound group sites. The purpose of this thesis is to further define the cultural history of occupation at Buffalo Lake. Analysis was performed on 258 projectile points to determine point types and associate cultural time periods. Furthermore, raw material analysis was performed to provide data on socio-economic connections between Buffalo Lake and other regions outside its vicinity. Additionally, 179 ceramic rim sherds have been assessed to determine their type. This enforces the distribution areas of different ceramic types through the Woodland Tradition and Buffalo Lake’s association with these areas. Analysis of projectile point types reflects occupation from Late Paleoindian up through Late Woodland, a span of over 10,000 years. Moreover, people regularly depended on locally available lithic source materials, such as Prairie du Chien chert. As time progressed, non-local materials used for manufacturing points became more evident at Buffalo Lake. By the Late Woodland, silicified sandstone sourced from western Wisconsin was more utilized than locally available sources. Ceramic types reflect that Buffalo Lake initially had more affiliation with groups who derived from southerly regions of Wisconsin. Gradually, Buffalo Lake went from neighboring edges of distribution areas to transcending into the epicenter of different ceramic distribution areas. This likely indicates that Buffalo Lake went from neighboring territorial boundaries to a more centralized location for exchange of goods, ideas, and establishment of burial practice customs.