Dept. of Archaeology

Bryn Tapper will be defending his PhD proposal on Friday 17th February at 3:30pm in QC-2013, entitled 'Rock art landscapes of the Canadian Maritimes'.

Bryn's research examines the contents and contexts of the Algonquian rock-art sites of the Canadian Maritimes in order to examine the role of petroglyphs in indigenous societies in the past. Seeking to integrate formal archaeological methods with informed ethnographic approaches his research looks to produce complimentary understandings of the rock-art, its subject matter, and landscape context. Bryn is investigating the rock-art sites at various scales - from motif, to panel, to site, to landscape setting - in order to articulate the different functional and ideological levels at which these phenomena operated. Such an approach informs how the content and composition of the images, the materiality of rock surfaces, the environs of the rock-art sites, as well as Maritime Algonquian concepts of landscape, combine to make socially significant places in the landscape. The research aims to provide new perspectives on pre-contact indigenous cultural life in the Maritimes, and contribute to studies attempting to understand how First Nations groups of the region adjusted to European contact and colonisation from the 16th century onwards.