Recognizing River Power: Watery Views of Ontario’s Fur Trade

Abstract

Revisiting fur trade collections at the Royal Ontario Museum, this essay explores connections and potential interplay between historical archaeology and assemblage theory. With few exceptions, archaeologists studying “modernity” over the last 500 years—including those studying the fur trade—have paid little attention to assemblage theory. Also referred to as “new materialisms,” assemblage theory highlights the qualities and vibrancies of substances, their relationality, and their part in energy flows. These distinctly non-anthropocentric emphases present challenges to standard notions of humanity employed in historical archaeology. Building on this general premise, we experiment with “(re)assembling” historical archaeology by rethinking and reframing aspects of the North American fur trade as it relates to rivers. Archaeological assemblages collected from the beds of several major riverways in Ontario speak to common themes studied in historical archaeology, yet also attest to the ways in which the fur trade depended upon harnessing river power that often acted back in unpredictable and sometimes violent ways. Brought into dialogue with records kept by traders, the collections offer useful perspectives on the deep entanglements between fur trade histories and rivers. From an assemblage perspective, we use these examples to reframe the role of non-human forces in the fur trade and to further challenge dualisms between nature/culture and human/non-human in historical archaeology.