Getting it All Wrong: Adventures in Academic Archaeology
by Peter Ramsden (St John’s, Newfoundland)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Ramsden-2
Friday, March 15, 2024 in LR Wilson 1003
3:30pm – 5:00pm
*No pre-registration required
I hope it’s not too presumptuous to take this opportunity to look
back over some research projects I conducted during my twenty-five years
at McMaster, and to see whether any useful lessons might be drawn from
my missteps and (largely accidental) successes. Along the way, I’ll try
to present some insights into the lives of some people in the past:
e.g., farming villagers in the Kawartha Lakes area of Ontario in the
16th century, hunter-foragers in Southeast Ireland 8,000 years ago, and
maritime hunters in the Central Canadian Arctic 5,000 years ago (or as
much as there is time for). The connecting arc is likely to be that
things almost never go the way you expect them to.
I first got involved in Ontario archaeology as a high school student
in about 1961, and abandoned my former intention of going into medicine.
I got an Honours BA of Anthropology from the University of Toronto
(1967), and MA in Archaeology from the University of Calgary (1968), and
a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto (1975). Since
retiring from McMaster I have remained active to the extent of
continuing to publish interpretations of a series of Late Woodland sites
in the Kawartha Lakes that I excavated/tested in the mid-1970s. I have
also branched into a ‘second career’ in photography and design, which I
do even less well than I did archaeology but it helps keep me occupied.