Lecture Series: Bones, Totems and Middens
All lectures are held at Malaspina University-College in the Education/Social Sciences Building (356) in Room 109 or Room 111 from 7-9 PM. Lectures are open to everyone. Membership for the year (includes the full lecture series and the quarterly publication The Midden) is as follows: $24 Family, $19 Individual, and $14 Student/Senior. Non-members will be asked to pay $5.00 per lecture at the door. Refreshments are available.
Past Lectures of 2005-2009 Series
May 8th 2009: Celia Nord
Investigating Gender and Mortuary Variability in the Pre-contact Archaeology of the Canadian Plateau
Until recently, southern interior British Columbia archaeological research has concentrated primarily upon the investigation of housepit village sites from the last 4,000 years (Nicholas 1997:90). This has restricted our understanding of the development and range of pre-contact lifeways to a narrow window of time and a limited view of social, political and economic organization of small-scale societies. While several recent studies hint at a greater range of past behaviour, especially in terms of “complexity” (e.g., Prentiss and Kuijt 2004), the numerous unpublished reports by British Columbia consulting archaeologists often give only generalized views of Plateau societies.
Within the field of consulting archaeology (and even within academia), it is not uncommon for a previous precedence to be used without question and for reports to be recycled as templates. This ensures, that if there is a lack of references to women in the archaeological reports, that this data will be recycled unchallenged. This disparity needs to be addressed, particularly in terms of subjects not previously researched in the Canadian Plateau, such as gender. Fortunately, in recent years, there has been an increase in the use of gender archaeological theory (e.g., Nelson and Rosen-Avalon 2002) and feminist anthropological theory (e.g., Ackerman 2003) within the discipline. However, the representation and visibility of women in the past, especially in the Canadian Plateau region, still suffers from serious neglect, resulting in an incomplete and skewed understanding of the nature of Plateau society over time.
My MA thesis research focuses on issues surrounding the archaeological visibility of precontact Canadian Plateau women, in part through a study of gender and artifact relationships reflected within mortuary variability. An overview of pre-contact Plateau archaeological and ethnographic investigations that concentrate on the Canadian Plateau provides a background within which to anchor the results of a gender and mortuary variability study. Ultimately, this research will contribute towards a fuller, more complete archaeological depiction of the lives of both women and men in the past within the precontact Canadian Plateau.
May 15th 2009: Ken Porteous
Biography
Ken graduated in 2007 from Vancouver Island University with a major in Anthropology and a minor in Geology. He is an authority on the paleontology of Vancouver Island and has found over 70 new taxa of fossil invertebrates over the past fifteen years. In addition, he is an experienced flintknapper with research interests in lithics, hominid cognitive evolution and hominid dispersal out of Africa. Ken spent five weeks working at a Neanderthal site at Scladina Grotto, Belgium during the summer of 2007.
Abstract
For more than a century paleoanthropologists attempted to unravel the story of hominid evolution and dispersal with only a few scraps of bone and a pile of stone tools. With scant evidence they were able to discern five species of our genus Homo, a remarkable feat little changed, and four species of the genus Australopithecus tracing our evolution back at least 3.7 million years. Approximately 30 years ago the pace of discovery began to change, slowly at first but with increasing acceleration to the present. The results of this wave of discovery are the addition of three new genera, one established genus divided into two adding a fourth new genus and the addition of 11 new species. Hominid evolution, which was once represented by the scraps of a few dozen individuals, is now represented by scraps and nearly complete examples of hundreds of individuals pushing our knowledge of hominid evolution back 6 - 7 million years. This presentation will introduce you to the amazing story, more interesting than we could ever had hoped, of our hominid family and the tools they made.
June 6th 2009 AGM