Abstract
Revisiting fur trade collections at the Royal Ontario Museum, this essay explores connections and potential interplay between historical archaeology and assemblage theory. With few exceptions, archaeologists studying “modernity” over the last 500 years—including those studying the fur trade—have paid little attention to assemblage theory. Also referred to as “new materialisms,” assemblage theory highlights the qualities and vibrancies of substances, their relationality, and their part in energy flows. These distinctly non-anthropocentric emphases present challenges to standard notions of humanity employed in historical archaeology. Building on this general premise, we experiment with “(re)assembling” historical archaeology by rethinking and reframing aspects of the North American fur trade as it relates to rivers. Archaeological assemblages collected from the beds of several major riverways in Ontario speak to common themes studied in historical archaeology, yet also attest to the ways in which the fur trade depended upon harnessing river power that often acted back in unpredictable and sometimes violent ways. Brought into dialogue with records kept by traders, the collections offer useful perspectives on the deep entanglements between fur trade histories and rivers. From an assemblage perspective, we use these examples to reframe the role of non-human forces in the fur trade and to further challenge dualisms between nature/culture and human/non-human in historical archaeology.
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Notes
The nature of the Canadian portion of the QSURP’s collecting and recordation practices preclude us from drawing precise conclusions about geographic distributions of fur trade materials in rivers; like any archaeological remains, the underwater assemblages at the Royal Ontario Museum are undoubedtly incomplete. But we also lack detailed information on the sampling strategy employed. We know about the areas from which artifacts were collected but much less information is available on the areas of rivers that were not surveyed or did not yield artifacts.
These marks were previously interpreted as B.A.R. Hanson (2010) recently discovered that the reported letter “R” in the “BAR” mark on the Winnipeg River axes was actually a letter “B” in which the bottom leg of the letter had been broken off of the punch.
The British likely introduced iron tomahawks to North America during the eighteenth century and they were used into the early nineteenth century (Peterson 1965: p. 29).
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Acknowledgements
Amélie’s research at the ROM is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s postdoctoral research fellowship (grant no. 756-2017-0638). We thank Sarah Horn and Molly Minnick for providing technical support for this research project.
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Cipolla, C.N., Allard, A. Recognizing River Power: Watery Views of Ontario’s Fur Trade. J Archaeol Method Theory 26, 1084–1105 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9405-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9405-z