Landscape bundling of ceremonial Earthworks: Incorporating ethnohistoric and contemporary Indigenous ontologies to revive Great Lakes archaeological legacy datasets

• Published in: Journal of anthropological archaeology 2021-06, Vol.62, p.101272, Article 101272
• Main Authors: Howey, Meghan C.L., Brouwer Burg, Marieka
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bundling; Earthworks; GIS; Great lakes; Indigenous ontologies; Landscape; Legacy data; Mounds
• ISSN: 0278-4165; 1090-2686
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2021.101272

•Novel questions are asked about the emplacement of ceremonial monuments.•Indigenous ontologies are used as a theoretical framework.•Legacy archaeological data is revived through GIS.•Earthworks formed landscape-scale bundles of specific topographic landforms.•Late Precontact ceremonial earthworks differed significantly from random locations. The thousands of ancestral Indigenous mounds and earthworks of Eastern North America have long been a source of intrigue for diverse audiences. And although explanations have come a long way from the days of the Mound Builder Myth, there are avenues of inquiry that remain under-investigated. Here, we seek to let Indigenous ontologies lead the way by employing an interpretive lens based on bundling, a significant practice across many North American Indigenous peoples. We expand the notion of bundling to the landscape scale and, drawing on ethnohistoric and contemporary understandings of Anishinaabeg and Ho-Chunk ontologies, suggest that Great Lakes earthworks were brought into being for/through the bundling together of relationships between humans, other-than-human persons, and the land. This lens sets the scene for novel geospatial and statistical analyses of a legacy archaeological dataset of Late Precontact (ca. CE 1200–1600) earthworks in the Great Lakes, most of which have been destroyed. This study reinvigorates a fragmentary legacy data set, a practice that – during a time of pandemic-related restrictions on travel and field work – should become more prominent in archaeological investigations. This study illustrates the value of blending quantitative approaches and Indigenous ontologies to studies of landscape-scale processes and meanings.