Ritual, Materiality and Memory in an Iroquoian VIllage

This study has sought to demonstrate that analyses of Iroquoian ceramics that focus on technological practices can provide new insights into Iroquoian materiality and ritual. Implicit in this approach is the notion that many objects contain within them a record of human decisions that articulate with social practices. I have examined four types of ceramic objects typically recovered from Ontario Iroquoian villages: smoking pipes, pots, juvenile pots, and fired clay lumps. Through the application of novel methods of ceramic petrography to the objects recovered from Holly, an early 14th century AD Iroquoian village, I documented the technological choices made during Iroquoian engagement with ceramic objects throughout their biographies, and related them to social practices using contextual and spatial data. When viewed as a whole, the evidence presented suggests that the ceramic objects at Holly were made in several overlapping but distinct communities of practice. In particular, pottery vessels were made by a smaller group of experienced craftspeople, using a restricted palette of materials and techniques. Smoking pipes, however, were made by larger numbers of people of differing skill levels, using a wider range of materials. The patterned use of dark-coloured rock temper in smoking pipes and pottery embodied the intentionality of their creators or users and served as a symbolic referent to Iroquoian cosmological beliefs. The deliberate fragmentation and preferential deposition of dark-tempered smoking pipes in the structured deposits of de-commissioned sweat lodges served as symbolic referents to two types of memories: both at the object level, where dark-tempered pipes were deliberately broken, exposing their black temper that had been hidden since manufacture, thereby revealing (or perhaps confirming) their symbolically informed production history; and in the built environment of a longhouse, where deposition in a socially sanctioned space might have served to create appropriate memories of the transactions taking place that were associated with darkness, smoking, and the spirit-world. In this way, material qualities precipitated remembrance. For its occupants, the space inside an Iroquoian longhouse was filled with invisible deposits associated with objects, materials, and memories that reflected and reified Iroquoian cosmologies, and influenced quotidian social practices.Ph.D