Diverse histories of Ground Stone Gorgets in Southern Ontario

Abstract:

In this talk, I present an assemblage of ground stone gorgets from the Royal Ontario Museum’s Archaeology of the Americas legacy collections through the lens of object histories. Combining technological and usewear analyses with museum catalogue entries allows to reconsider the temporal and functional attributions of this understudied object category: gorgets are typically dated to ca. 3000-1500 BP and their function is uncertain. Additionally, it brings forward their varied and continued histories as Indigenous belongings as well as their complicated post-contact trajectories as antiquarianist collectibles and museum objects. Revisiting these often decontextualized gorgets and their ongoing relations helps rethink some of archaeology’s core concepts (e.g., hylomorphism, typology, authenticity) and find new avenues for making legacy collections more accessible and meaningful in the present.

Bio:

Tiziana Gallo is a Sessional Lecturer at Trent University and at University of Toronto in Mississauga, and Research Associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, where she recently completed a Rebanks Postdoctoral Fellowship of Ontario. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and a M.Sc. in Anthropology from Université de Montréal. Specializing in ground stone artifacts, her doctoral dissertation focused on ground stone celts found on ancestral and historic Wendat village sites in Ontario. She explored how different types of stones used to make celts became meaningful for the Wendat and how these impacted cultural practices and relations to landscapes. For her postdoctoral project, she studied ROM’s extensive birdstone and gorget collections from a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing geology, technological, functional, and spatial analyses (GIS). Her research seeks to retrace these cultural belongings’ provenience and acquisition history to facilitate transparency and Indigenous access, while critically addressing the impacts of Western epistemologies on Indigenous Peoples, lands, and histories.