Exploring Relationality: Perspectives on the Research Narratives of the Rock Art of the Algonquian-Speaking Peoples of C
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Exploring Relationality: Perspectives on the Research Narratives of the Rock Art of the Algonquian-Speaking Peoples of Central and Eastern Canada Bryn Tapper 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Over the past six decades, researchers investigating the rock art of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of Central and Eastern Canada have produced interpretations that recognize and draw on Algonquian peoples’ oral traditions, worldviews, and realities. Mainly characterized by the use of ethnohistorical and ethnographic evidence and analogy, this has resulted in a number of important developments and trends in Algonquian rock art research. In particular, this research has identified some of the motives, practices, and performances that underpin the making of rock art, and focused attention on the ways in which humans and other-than-humans are implicated. It has also revealed the paradigms within which researchers have operated. In recent years, the interest in ‘new animism’ has resulted in a shift from epistemological concerns to new ontologically related approaches, which engage Algonquian ontologies as sources of theory and heuristic tools with which to examine the relationality and agency of rock art. The trajectory of current research indicates that the recognition and acceptance of ontological multiplicity and the multivocality of the past are crucial not only to the interpretation of rock art but also to the ‘worlding practices’ that characterize Algonquian rock art research. Keywords Rock art . Canada . Algonquian . History . Ontology
* Bryn Tapper [email protected]
1
Department of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL A1C 5S7, Canada
Tapper
Introduction In recent years, numerous authors have drawn attention to the turbulent and mobile state of archaeological theory (e.g. Lucas 2015; Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2017; Thomas 2015) and have asserted that ‘we are in a period of theoretical and methodological experimentation and reorientations’ (Kristiansen 2015: 14). Emerging from this dynamic environment, there has been a widespread consensus that ‘we are past theoretical hegemonies’ (Kristiansen 2015: 25) and that archaeological theory is moving out of the previously dominant processual/post-processual polemic (Alberti 2016; Harris and Cipolla 2017; Moro Abadía 2017). For instance, some archaeologists, weary of theoretical discussions on what we can know about the past and how we can know it, have insisted that archaeology must ‘move from critique to action’ with a particular consideration for the multivocality of the past (Atalay et al. 2014: 10–11; GonzálezRuibal 2018: 348). In this context, some authors have indicated a shift from epistemological questions concerning the ways in which knowledge is constructed in the world to ontological questions focusing on ways of being and becoming in multiple worlds (Alberti 2016: 164; Alberti and Bray 2009; Lucas 2012: 3). This shift is generally known as the ‘ontological turn’ (Alberti 2016; Alberti et al. 2011
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