Research Projects

A Landscape of Craft with Indigenous Master Potter, Richard Zane Smith

Awarded to Scott Martin and Christine Cluney in March 2020, the ELAP grant began life as a way for McMaster Archaeological Field School students to find and collect clay and temper from the landscape and learn how to make and fire pots under the mentorship of Master Potter, Richard Zane Smith, of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas.  With the pandemic and other challenges, the ELAP grant pivoted to become a Research Assistantship for undergraduate, Selby Westbrook, who supported Andy Roddick's Ceramic Analysis course, which was also able to showcase teaching by Richard Zane Smith via Zoom.  A small number of clay sources were sampled from in spring 2022. 

With the closing of the ELAP grant, Westbrook's project merged into a summer 2022 Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA), which gave her time to continue working with the recently sourced clays and tempers, but also to begin to work with the ceramic assemblage from Nursery (AhGx-8), the venue of recent McMaster Archaeological Field Schools, where she divided up the diversity of ceramic pastes into paste groups.

Towards a More Equitable Ontario Archaeology: Hearing Indigenous Voices

Awarded to Scott Martin and Adrianne Lickers Xavier in June 2021, this grant was on hold and has changed its name slightly as it has been reimagined. This work has recently been taken up by PhD candidate, Emily Anson.  More to come...

Collaborative Archaeologies, Decolonized Foodways

Won by Andy Roddick, Adrianne Lickers Xavier, Scott Martin and Tanya Hill-Montour, we have been working since March 2022 on the pilot project 'Collaborative Archaeologies, Decolonized Foodways'. Here, our Indigenous-Settler Collaborative Archaeology Working Group, which includes Kalyan Chakraborty, Shalen Prado, Greg Braun, Jackie Porter and Rylan Godbout have been focused on learning more about Neutral Iroquoian foodways by recovering lipids and starch grains from those sherds.  We are also learning about decolonising and Indigenising collections-based archaeological research.  We hope a larger collaborative project will derive from this PEG. 

Decolonising Ontario Archaeology: An Indigenous Voice for Indigenous Pasts

Awarded to Scott Martin in March 2022, this grant was taken up by Jacqueline Porter in 2023 and gave her some time at Sustainable Archaeology McMaster, alongside her undergraduate work in Indigenous Studies and Anthropology, to explore collections management procedures, to receive training from Dr. Greg Braun in petrography and to build a presentation on Ontario Archaeology.

Indigenous Archaeological Collections Management: A Template for Repatriation/Rematriation for Sustainable Archaeology McMaster

More to come...

Decolonising Ontario Archaeology: Establishing an Advisory Circle to Support Repatriation/Rematriation through Student-Led Research and Outreach

Won by Scott Martin and Carrie McMullin in 2023, this grant will showcase cross-disciplinary, particularly Indigenous, guest lecturers and will feature Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe Research Assistants' work in reshaping a 2017 (settler-voiced) Ontario Archaeology seminar (Advanced Topics in Archaeology I: Archaeological Practice in Ontario: An Introduction to Academic and Consultant Archaeologies (ANTHROP 4E03). More to come...

ANTHROP 3CC6: [Collaborative] Archaeological Field School. Proposed Subtitle: Reconciling Sealey, Rewriting Attawandaron

Won by Scott Martin in 2024, this grant will allow a future field school to benefit from the experience of PhD candidate, Emily Anson, as gleaned from her fieldwork, her learning from Haudenosaunee colleagues on the Ohneganos Project and her strides towards Rematriating the Discipline of Archaeology.

Following extensive looting over a century ago along with some archaeological investigations and then additional illegal collecting into the last quarter of the 20th century, Sealey (AgHa-4) is the proposed location of a future McMaster University Collaborative Archaeological Field School.  More to come...