Hunter-gatherer Mobility, Territoriality, and Placemaking in the Kawartha Lakes Region, Ontario.

This paper is about the archaeological settlement patterns generated by mid to late Holocene (ca. 5000 to 1000 cal BP) hunter-gatherer societies in the Kawarthas region of south-central Ontario. My central goal is to evaluate the extent to which the structure of the regional waterway network was a determinant influence on regional mobility and spatial interaction, and thus also the formation of persistent places used over millennia for residential and ritual purposes. To do this, I generate predictions concerning the catchment sizes of central place foraging locations and apply a simple spatial interaction model that prioritizes centrality as a critical factor influencing settlement choices in the regional waterway network. At spatial scales commensurate with daily foraging, the predictions concerning centrality exhibit statistically robust concordance with site locations, and a poor fit with random control data, supporting the model's assumptions. Furthermore, ritual places used by ancient communities for elaborate mortuary programs were found to be central at geographic scales exceeding the predicted range of residential foraging. This strengthens the hypothesis that these places were selected as a function of their strategic position within much larger geographic networks, commensurate with territorial areas and places of heighted inter-community interaction. This offers support for interpreting these locations not only as places where ritual and economic needs were entwined, but also as locations of pronounced socioecological value where tenure and access rights were signaled and reinforced by the acts of ritual placemaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]