Dr. Ben Ford, of the Anthropology Department, presented a paper titled “Changes in Perception and Perceptions of Change on the Lake Ontario Shore” at the seventy-fifth annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in St. Louis on April 18, 2010.
The paper discussed his research on littoral environments. These are never static; water rises and falls, transportation networks open and close, and resources come and go on daily, seasonal, and longer time scales. The perception of these changes also shifts with time and variations in culture. Perceptions of less mutable features of the Lake Ontario shore (e.g., the international boundary and the threat of storms) have shifted with time as well.
How maritime cultures perceived both change and continuity affected their interactions with the shore environment and the substance of the archaeological record. Data for this analysis was drawn from a combined terrestrial and maritime archaeological survey.
