Kenneth Roy Holyoke

This project will explore how lithic resources, and the bedrock sources for those resources, offer a space for understanding pre-Contact Wabanaki place-making and how groups interacted with, and constructed their past landscapes. The Wabanaki are an Eastern Algonkian speaking group comprised of present-day Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), Mi’kmaq, Peskotomuhkatiyik (Passamaquoddy), and Penobscot peoples. Their traditional homeland is the Maritime Peninsula (Hoffman 1955), which encompasses the Canadian Maritime Provinces, southern Quebec, and eastern Maine. I will focus my project around the known bedrock source for Washademoak Multi-coloured Chert (WMCC) at Belyeas Cove, Washademoak Lake, in the Lower Saint John River Valley region, New Brunswick, Canada. Persistent place-making is built through mutually constituted relationships between people, their landscapes, and the things they create (Maher 2018). The circulation of those things builds connections to, and between, places (Halperin 2014) and can be thought of as a type of portable place-making. By tracking the distribution of WMCC through time and space, this research explores the relationship between past peoples and their landscapes — natural and social –how those relationships were mediated through materials like stone, and how actions like quarrying, preparing, and circulating or exchanging stone were part of persistent place-making at the Belyeas Cove quarry.