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364 16. “Style” in Crafting Hybrid Material Culture on the Fringes of Empire: An Example from the Native North American Midcontinent Kathleen L. Ehrhardt Abstract: In northeastern North America, early (sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury ) encounters between native peoples and Europeans were accompanied by exchanges of foreign materials and objects that were of immediate and lasting interest to native consumers. Goods moved into the interior with surprising rapidity, appearing in the Mississippi valley well before Europeans themselves arrived. In this chapter, I examine the social dynamics of native appropriation of foreign material culture, specifically copper-base metals, into their own systems. I posit that the artifacts that resulted from these exchanges and the processes through which they were reconceptualized and made useful in native eyes are examples of material culture hybridity and hybridization. I suggest that a technological “systems” framework and technological “style” approach are well suited to the study of these processes in culture contact situations . Analyzing the distribution of almost 1,400 pieces of European-derived copper-base metal and objects made from it over excavated areas of the Iliniwek Village site, a large mid-to-late-seventeenth-century Illinois settlement on the Des Moines River (Clark County, Missouri), I explore the technological and social organization of crafting activity there. I identify domestic kin-based production and specialization manifested as skilled crafting as two important themes that figure prominently in the local transformation of European metals to ornamentation and the incorporation of these special types of hybrid material objects into everyday and specialized use contexts. This research provides one example of how hybrid cultural forms emerge and are consumed in situations of early native/European intercultural entanglement rather than in conditions of full-blown colonialism. It situates native The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, edited by Jeb J. Card. Center for Archaeological Investigations , Occasional Paper No. 39. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3314-1. “Style” in Crafting Hybrid Material Culture 365 peoples’ early intercultural interactions (however indirect) and their early material outcomes in relation to the level of influence particular colonial systems were actually able to exert on the colonial frontier and allows for interrogation of such concepts as acculturation, syncretization, agency, and material and social (re)production during this critical period. Introduction Despite the precarious state of their settlements in the lower St. Lawrence Valley, in the 1650s, the French turned their attention to the western Great Lakes (Figure 16-1). Their goals were to find a new route to China and new sources of furs and raw materials. They also sought new political alliances with native peoples, and new souls to convert to Christianity. Over the next decade, they would pursue these initiatives in earnest. By 1670, several small Jesuit mission outposts, which would double as headquarters for subsequent forays into the unexplored interior, were established in what were believed to be strategic locations west of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan at (what is now) Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and at Chequamegon Bay and Green Bay, Wisconsin. The French would call this northern country the pays d’en haut or “upper country.” Of the numerous and diverse groups of native peoples who inhabited the region at the time, perhaps relatively few had ever actually seen white people, having encountered them either at the growing settlements and trading centers of the St. Lawrence valley or through the rare appearances of illicit coureurs des bois (woods runners) who may have been engaged in illegal trade in the interior. Many more, however, had already felt directly or indirectly the repercussions of actions and events farther to the east whose causes could ultimately be attributed to escalating European activity. Disruptions were social, political, and material in nature. According to ethnohistorian Richard White (1991:xi–xii, 11, 15), by the turn of the mid-seventeenth century, the lands between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior were becoming a “land of refugees,” a “hodgepodge of people.” Remnant native populations (both Algonquian and Iroquoian), recently displaced by bloody and relentless Iroquoian aggressions on their homelands in Huronia and surrounding Lake Erie, sought refuge there and came to share lands and even village settlements with each other and with already present indigenous occupants (Algonquians and Siouans) who were yet to experience firsthand the effects of Europeans in their midst. Even before midcentury, however, native peoples of the upper country were inhabiting a changing material world. It is now commonly accepted by archaeologists that European products such...

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