Marking place and creating space in northern Algonquian landscapes: The rock -art of the Lake of the Woods region, Ontario.

Abstract

The research presented here addresses issues in the socio-cultural production of pictographic rock-art in the Lake of the Woods region of northwestern Ontario, Canada. The majority of previous research has worked to define pictographic rock-art, images painted on cliff faces and other rock outcrops, in the context of historically and ethnographically documented religious and cosmological belief systems of northern Algonquian Indians. Drawing from a diverse body of theoretical perspectives including landscape archaeology, information theory, and hunter-gatherer mobility and land tenure research, this study takes the perspective that pictographic rock-art had functions in addition to those previously suggested for the region. Some of the possible functions examined include territorial marking, trail marking, resource marking, marking of socially defined roles, identification of places of aggregation on the landscape, structuring of social interactions, and the marking of social identity at various levels within the society. Given this number of potential functions, four site types were proposed that communicated information regarding one or more of these functions: General Multiple Function, General Single Function, Specialized Multiple Function and Specialized Single Function. The site types were defined using a combination of the Shannon information measure and ethnographically defined image categories found among historic Algonquian groups. When mapped onto the study region, the distributions of these sites indicated patterning suggestive of several of the proposed functions. In particular, it provided support for the hypothesis that pictographic rock-art sites served to structure the social landscape by facilitating population movements across the landscape and to indicate and define forms of social interactions related to land tenure and social exchange. Of note is the observation that within the sample no pictographic sites were identified that served exclusively secular functions.