The University of Western Ontario

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Lawson Chair of Canadian Archaeology

About

I am interested in the ways in which we can interpret archaeological findings to access the long term histories of individuals’ and communities’ lived experiences, structures of social organisation, sense of territoriality and place, interaction, agency and internal and external notions of identity, as well as the always ongoing revision and reinforcement of these. I explore these social processes at play within and between generations primarily through the analysis of settlement-subsistence patterns and the range of material agency practices reflected in the assemblages from and between sites, and, when possible, from the archaeologically-meaningful data that can be “excavated” from archival research.

My focus has been the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal archaeology of Northeastern North America, particularly the Aboriginal communities of the Late and Terminal Woodland Traditions of the Great Lakes; and within and between communities of European colonizers and Aboriginal Nations.

I also worked for 20 years as an archaeologist for the Ontario provincial Ministry of Culture, where I developed additional research under the general heading of “archaeology as contemporary social practice.” This includes examining the intersection between Aboriginal and archaeologist rights and interests; issues in the contemporary practice of applied or CRM archaeology, including the ethics and "professionalization" of the archaeo­logical community; the relationship of CRM to the State; and the integration of, in particular, interpretive archaeological theory into the unreflexive practices of CRM. I am most interested in theorising applied archaeological practice as the locus of competing claims to the past and contested discourses over “heritage.”

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