LOMCLP-Theory

The history of the shore is seamless, with humans moving easily from water to land, utilizing resources throughout; archaeological investigations and interpretations should likewise be seamless. The Lake Ontario Maritime Cultural Landscape Study will integrate underwater and terrestrial archaeology into a more holistic reconstruction of past human actions by exploring both the relationships between people within the shore environment and the reciprocal relationships between people and the environment. This research will span the period from ~5000 BP to AD 1900 and will address diachronic changes in human uses of the shore. Changes between the pre-Contact period and early historic period and shifts during the mid-19th century will be specifically addressed. The role of the environment in shaping human actions along the shoreline and the long-term effects of human occupation on the shore environment will also be analyzed.
Water is central to human existence and the Earth’s water resources have been greatly affected by human activity, with many of these impacts occurring along shores and coasts. While shoreline utilization has increased since the Industrial Revolution, there is evidence of both planned and unintended human influences on the shore environment from antiquity. Given that human influences on the environment occur over large areas and are closely tied to cultural trends, studies of past effects naturally lend themselves to a landscape approach. Such an approach allows for anthropological questions of subsistence, trade, and colonization to be addressed. The shore is of particular interest because it is the area of most direct human interaction with the water and forms an interface between the well established fields of maritime and terrestrial archaeology. Consequently, a maritime landscape study of shore environments is well suited to answer many important questions.
Present-day definitions of boundaries between eco-zones are often based in modern perceptions rather than pre-Contact and historic experience. The distinctions between inland, shoreline, and lacustrine have powerful psychological ramifications but are artificial and have little relevance to the actual limits of archaeological sites. These divisions were not pertinent to the early inhabitants of the lake margin who not only employed the lake for transportation and as a food source, but who seamlessly shifted between terrestrial and marine occupations. In order to fully understand the lives and cultures of early inhabitants around Lake Ontario, both Native American and Euro-American, it is necessary to investigate their lives on both sides of the waterline and to understand that submerged and terrestrial deposits in the same vicinity were likely left by members of the same group, if not the same individuals.

Until recently terrestrial and underwater archaeologists have been disinclined to investigate the shore environment. Archaeologists in Britain, Europe, and Australia have been leading this movement, with fewer studies conducted in North America, and fewer still on Lake Ontario. There are acknowledged problems with working in the littoral zone. The most pronounced of these problems are the difficulties in excavating exposed but saturated soils and the dynamic nature of the shore zone. The action of waves, ice, and current, as well as the hydraulic suspension of soils, make site preservation and stratigraphy relevant concerns. However, many significant archaeological sites have been successfully recorded in these environments. More than these concerns, the neglect of the shore is largely a result of disciplinary divisions between terrestrial and submerged archaeology. Most terrestrial archaeologists have viewed the waterline as an insurmountable boundary, preferring not to excavate saturated soils and perceiving submerged lands to be a sterile plain, much like the water’s surface. For their part, underwater archaeologists have focused the vast majority of their attention on ships, preferring these complex and important sites to the broader archaeological resource of the shore. The proposed survey may encounter unrecorded shipwrecks driven ashore during storms, but will also seek sites such as steamboat wood depots, informal shipyards, shore habitation and recreation sites, anchorages, industrial sites, transit sites such as piers and schooner landings, resource procurement sites such as fish weirs and fishing stations, and other evidence of human activity along the shoreline. There are important aspects of North American pre-Contact and historical archaeology embedded in the shore. Yet, the shore is a largely vacant methodological and theoretical niche in North American archaeology. This proposed research is designed to address that vacancy.
Political boundaries form another arbitrary divide in the archaeological record. While the present Canada-United States border originated with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, citizens of both nations moved freely back and forth prior to the War of 1812 and there was much international trade and communication, both legal and illicit, during the 19th century. Furthermore, there is ample evidence of Native American movement within the region during the pre-Contact and historic periods. However, the Canadian and United States archaeological communities do not regularly interact along the New York-Ontario border, and many archaeologists are not readily aware of what their international peers are investigating no more 85 km distant. The research proposed here aims to bridge these physical, disciplinary, and political divides in order to reconstruct a more holistic view of the past.
In addition to these theoretical issues, there are practical preservation and environmental reasons for studying the archaeology of the shore. There is growing concern about the effects of erosion on sites in littoral zones throughout the world, and on Lake Ontario specifically. The northeast shore of Lake Ontario is protected by islands and embayments, leading to significantly less erosion than is the case for the remainder of the lake. However, erosion does occur in this region and is exacerbated by new shore development that shifts the natural movement of sediments and exposes archaeological sites. While each year likely sees the loss of information due to erosion, the process can only be measured by systematic survey and analysis. The proposed research offers a model for performing such a survey. Furthermore, the results of the proposed study can be used to establish priorities for shore research throughout Lake Ontario.
There are other environmental reasons for an archaeological study of the shoreline. With approximately 8.2 million people living around its margins, Lake Ontario’s water quality has been a subject of concern and debate since it was first discussed in the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. The majority of pollution is concentrated along the shorelines, in particular near major population centers. The tendency for pollution to accumulate along the shoreline is not a new phenomenon, and the proposed study of Lake Ontario’s northeast shore allows for an interesting historical comparison. The northeast shore, situated near the inlet of the St. Lawrence River, was developed early in the lake’s history, but has since been surpassed by other areas such as Toronto, Hamilton, Niagara, and Rochester. Thus, pollution of the northeast shore can be better tied to historic causes than in more developed portions of the shoreline. Evidence for the long-term impacts of human occupation along the shore has the potential to inform the larger discussion of lake health.
In addition to lacking a holistic archeological study of the shore, the maritime archaeology of Lake Ontario has yet to be studied in a lake-wide context. Lake Ontario contains more than 1000 shipwrecks and is surrounded by approximately 780 recorded sites within 0.5 km of the shore; however, much of these data have not been synthesized. In addition to the archaeological site files housed at the Ontario Ministry of Culture, the Parks Canada Agency, New York State Museum, and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, there are many excellent historical accounts and general histories of the lake, as well as studies of trade routes, shipwrecks, and specific ports, but this information has yet to be synthesized into a comprehensive anthropological study of the lake’s maritime culture. Many of these studies pertain only to a limited geographic area or a specific period. The research proposed here provides an opportunity to move from smaller specific studies towards a larger combined study of the lake. The combination of the proposed archaeological study with previous work in a single, lake-wide analysis will be of value to all maritime archaeologists, as well as state, provincial, and national agencies with an interest in the lakes. An active discourse between the specific proposed archaeological study and the more general lake-wide synthesis will create a well-informed analysis, in which the specifics can be evaluated in the broader regional context and long-term trends can be compared to specific material data in a localized area.
A landscape approach is natural for this research, because, as W.G. Hoskins (1955:14) stated, landscapes are “the richest historical record we posses.” A landscape approach is based on the premise that each aspect of the region – cultural, political, environmental, technological, and physical – is interrelated and can not be understood without reference to the others. Thus, the very notion of a landscape lends itself to a seamless analysis of human occupation along the shore. The landscape is defined by natural and historical factors, rather than contrived boundaries that do not reflect the geography of the archaeological record. Furthermore, landscapes involve an active exchange between behavior and nature, in which humans and the environment react to one another, causing humans to continually reinterpret their surroundings. Such interrelationships demand the study of human impacts on the environment. While human perceptions of their influence constantly change, a better understanding of past effects will help to anticipate and direct future interaction between people and the littoral landscape.