Kenneth Kidd Lecture Series “Women’s axes and steel-made gorgets: Considering more diverse ground stone object histories in Southern Ontario” by Dr. Tiziana Gallo
During the last thousand years, ground stone objects played important and active roles among Indigenous people in the American Northeast
Event Details
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Thursday, February 29, 2024
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Science Complex 115
Join us for a guest lecture! During the last thousand years, ground stone objects played important and active roles among Indigenous people in the American Northeast. Because they are still an understudied artifact category, their interpretation tends to rely on assumptions internalized by the archaeological discipline. In this talk, I revisit ground stone celts found on 14th and 15th century Ancestral Wendat village sites and an assemblage of gorgets from the Royal Ontario Museum’s Archaeology of the Americas collection. Combining wear analyses and experimental archaeology with a variety of historical sources such as the writings of Indigenous authors, ethnohistorical accounts, and museum catalogue entries allows to challenge celts’ and gorgets’ temporal and functional attributions. Together, these approaches reveal that Ancestral Wendat ground stone celts were used in a multitude of tasks and, in many cases, by women. They also show that while gorgets are typically dated to ca.3000-1500 BP, many were made or modified with steel tools that would have only been available post-contact. Looking deeper into these object categories helps bring to light the diversity and complexity of their temporal and social relations and suggests more nuanced and inclusive narratives.
Bio: Tiziana Gallo is currently a Sessional Faculty Member at Trent University Durham. She recently completed a Rebanks Postdoctoral Fellowship of Ontario Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and a M.Sc. in Anthropology from Université de Montréal. Specializing in ground stone artifacts, her doctoral dissertation focused on ground stone celts found on ancestral and historic Wendat village sites in Ontario. She explored how different types of stones used to make celts became meaningful for the Wendat and how these impacted cultural practices and understandings of landscapes. For her postdoctoral project, she studied ROM’s extensive birdstone and gorget collections from a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing geology, technological, functional, and spatial analyses (GIS). Her research seeks to retrace these cultural belongings’ provenience and acquisition history to facilitate transparency and Indigenous access, while critically addressing the impacts of Western epistemologies on Indigenous Peoples, lands, and histories.