Ethnoarchaeology of an Inter-Cultural Frontier

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Hetty Jo Brumbach and Robert Jarvenpa developed a long-term project and general research strategy for investigating the processes by which Chipewyan, Cree, Metis, and European populations adapted to the natural environment, to an evolving fur trade political economy, and to each other as competing/cooperating social groups in north-central Canada. Our interpretive framework linked local ecological relations with fur trade specialization and the nature of intergroup behavior and communication. The data base for assessing this framework was retrieved by a methodology combining participant and ethnoarchaeological observation of ongoing behaviors with native consultants' testimony and archaeological documentation of a network of late historic sites in the Upper Churchill River and Cree Lake drainage systems of northwestern Saskatchewan. A network of 41 sites represented native multi-family seasonal settlements and trading outpost communities spanning the period from the 1890s to 1950s. Corroborative historical evidence also was retrieved from fur trade journals and business account books kept by the Hudson's Bay Company and other trading firms.

Among other conclusions, this research revealed that

1. Chipewyan and Cree hunter-gatherer groups adapted to each other and to the European community by widening and generalizing their niches,
2. differences in frequency of "country food" (locally procured food) and imported food among Chipewyan, Cree, and Metis groups at different periods of time become indices of these groups' economic specialization and integration into the fur trade,
3. a trend from highly competitive toward cooperative inter-ethnic relations over time may be related to the process of increasing niche width noted previously, and
4. a system of "stratification," or socioeconomic dominance, among these politically autonomous populations is related to a combination of biological, historical, social and culural factors.

Read more about it:

Brumbach, Hetty Jo, Robert Jarvenpa, and Clifford Buell. 1982 An Ethnoarchaeological Approach to Chipewyan Adaptations in the Late Fur Trade Period. Arctic Anthropology 19:1-49.

Jarvenpa, Robert, and Hetty Jo Brumbach. 1985 Occupational Status, Ethnicity and Ecology: Metis Cree Adaptations in a Canadian Trading Frontier. Human Ecology 13:309-329.

Jarvenpa, Robert, and Hetty Jo Brumbach. 1988 Socio-Spatial Organization and Decision Making Processes: Observations from the Chipewyan. American Anthropologist 90:598-618.

Brumbach, Hetty Jo, and Robert Jarvenpa. 1989 Ethnoarchaeological and Cultural Frontiers: Athapaskan, Algonquian and European Adaptations in the Central Subarctic. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.