Anthropology Colloquium is the department’s speaker series that invites a mixture of anthropologists from within and outside of UBC to present their research. This speaker series is scheduled throughout the academic year, typically with a lunch reception in the AnSo Lounge.
The Temporality of the Seascape in the Southern Strait of Georgia
Thursday January 15, 2015
Anthropology and Sociology Building (ANSO) 134
11:30 – 1:00 pm
Event Poster: PDF
Dr. Paul Ewonus
Abstract
In hunter-gatherer studies and the archaeology of small and intermediate scale societies, documenting the nature of changes in regional settlement is of considerable interest. The relationships among subsistence and social developments, as well as technological innovations, and changing landscapes are often seen as complex and contextual, but also important to our understanding of human history in a more general sense. In this talk I explore the extent and nature of temporal shifts in the social landscape of a substantial part of the Salish Sea, assessing seasonal land use through an understanding of place. Zooarchaeological analysis of a sample of thirty sites suggests that while extensive variation was characteristic of southern Strait of Georgia settlement from 3200 BC to contact with Europeans, late winter and early spring site use was prominent on southeastern Vancouver Island. The southern Gulf and San Juan Islands appear more generally to have been a focus of spring and summer inhabitation. This pattern is most evident during an important period of village aggregation in the southern Strait of Georgia between 650 BC and AD 650, although it is expressed to a lesser extent both before and after this interval. Not only are the landscapes and seascapes of the past accessible from an environmental or economic perspective using regional site results, but aspects of the social relationships that were brought into being along with those places and pathways may also be revealed.
Bio
Dr. Paul Ewonus holds degrees in Archaeology from Simon Fraser University (BA Hons, 2001), McMaster University (MA, 2006) and Cambridge University (PhD, 2011). He is a landscape archaeologist and social zooarchaeologist specializing in Northeast Pacific archaeology and British prehistory in Northeast Atlantic context, with an interest in the archaeology of small- and intermediate-scale coastal and island societies more broadly. His practical experience includes research and commercial archaeology in coastal and interior BC, as well as research fieldwork in the UK. Dr. Ewonus teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
