The next meeting of the London Chapter OAS will be online via ZOOM. It will be held on Thursday, April 13, 2023 at 7:30 PM. The speaker will be:

Dr. Jennifer Birch, Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, on: Changing Times: A tale of two villages and how archaeological science is rewriting public history in northeastern North America

Abstract: 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.

London Chapter members will be automatically sent a ZOOM link but anyone else wishing to attend can send an email request to Jim Keron at jrkeron@yahoo.com and he will send a link to the ZOOM meeting session. The ZOOM session normally opens about 7:00 PM.

Note that our April 13th ZOOM meeting is the last speaker meeting until September 2023.