Jennifer Birch University of Georgia.

The recent radiocarbon re-dating of key sites and events in Huron-Wendat archaeology has shaken dominant accounts of early colonial-era history in the northeast. This lecture will emphasize the fact that archaeology is just as much about good storytelling as it is about good science. It will discuss how redating of key Huron-Wendat archaeological sites by the Dating Iroquoia project has impacted understandings of conflict, confederacy-formation, and the entry of early European materials and persons in the early colonial era in ways that complicate public-facing narratives about culture contact and the collision of Indigenous and European world systems. As we swing back and forth between science and storytelling, we’ll consider how the development of artifact-independent chronologies affords Indigenous peoples new agency to assert control over narratives about their pasts, direct scientific research agendas concerned with the same, and craft public histories based on the results. Examples of how our work affects processes of commemoration and the erection of historical markers are highlighted, as is the importance of shared authority and Huron-Wendat leadership in future research agendas.

Dr. Birch is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia. Her research is underpinned by the desire to connect the lived experiences of individuals and communities to the development of organizational diversity and complexity in human societies. She accomplishes this work through analytical approaches that include Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates, social network analysis, and settlement-based approaches to the archaeological record. For the last five years she has directed the Dating Iroquoia project. She is the co-author, with Ronald F. Williamson, of “The Mantle Site: An Archaeological History of an Ancestral Wendat Community” and co-editor, with Victor D. Thompson of “The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America.”