Past and Present Research Projects

Awarded to Scott Martin and Christine Cluney in March 2020, the ELAP grant began life as a way for McMaster Archaeological Field School students to find and collect clay and temper from the landscape and learn how to make and fire pots under the mentorship of Master Potter, Richard Zane Smith, of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas.  With the pandemic and other challenges, the ELAP grant pivoted to become a Research Assistantship for undergraduate, Selby Westbrook, who supported Andy Roddick's Ceramic Analysis course, which was also able to showcase teaching by Richard Zane Smith via Zoom.  A small number of clay sources were sampled from in spring 2022. 

With the closing of the ELAP grant, Westbrook's project merged into a summer 2022 Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA), which gave her time to continue working with the recently sourced clays and tempers, but also to begin to work with the ceramic assemblage from Nursery (AhGx-8), the venue of recent McMaster Archaeological Field Schools, where she divided up the diversity of ceramic pastes into paste groups.

Awarded to Scott Martin and Adrianne Lickers Xavier in June 2021, this grant is currently on hold.  More to come...

Won by Andy Roddick, Adrianne Lickers Xavier, Scott Martin and Tanya Hill-Montour, we have been working since March 2022 on the pilot project 'Collaborative Archaeologies, Decolonized Foodways'. 

Here, our Indigenous-Settler Collaborative Archaeology Working Group, which includes Kalyan Chakraborty, Shalen Prado, Greg Braun, Jackie Porter and Rylan Godbout have been focused on learning more about Neutral Iroquoian foodways by recovering lipids and starch grains from those sherds.  We are also learning about decolonising and Indigenising collections-based archaeological research.  We hope a larger collaborative project will derive from this PEG. 

Awarded to Scott Martin in March 2022.  More to come...

Following extensive looting over a century ago along with some archaeological investigations and then additional illegal collecting into the last quarter of the 20th century, Sealey (AgHa-4) is the proposed location of a future McMaster University Collaborative Archaeological Field School.  More to come...