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"Ritualized Places and Multispecies Archaeology in the Chesapeake"

Abstract: Archaeological and ethnohistorical studies have begun to trace the ritualized practices of Native groups as they returned to ancestral places throughout the Southeast during the colonial era. In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, Native groups travelled across contested territories to bury ancestors, animals, and objects in places with long, precolonial occupations but no resident colonial-era residents. 

This brown bag presentation offers some ideas regarding these colonial-era practices by comparing them with the precolonial history of a site located near the James River that also lacked a yearlong residential population. Periodic visitation at the Hatch site produced a 400-year long record of human interments, dog burials, and feasting debris. 

This comparison raises questions concerning the complicated and shifting entanglements between human lives and dogs, highlighting intersections between landscape, political economy, and cultural representations in the Algonquian Chesapeake. My ideas regarding the significance of these entanglements are still preliminary and in flux, and I seek input colleagues regarding promising approaches for interpretation.

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