Petroglyphs on the periphery: the landscapes of rock art in the Canadian Maritimes

This dissertation offers a regional overview of traditions of rock art created by ancestral Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, and Peskotomuhkatiyik in the Canadian Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Specifically, it examines the changing roles of rock art across the boundary of European Contact, identifying similarities and differences in content, style, and landscape placement between pre- and postcontact traditions (and including comparisons with mobile art). Evidence for precontact rock art is limited, restricted to a single Late Woodland site in southern New Brunswick, yet it marks the eastern limit of rock art traditions, often associated with ritual specialists, recorded among Algonquian-speaking peoples stretching across the Canadian Shield, and extending from the Great Lakes to eastern Maine. Most rock art was made between the 17th and early 20th centuries, and the majority of that, during the 18th and 19th centuries. Analysis of the content, style, distribution, and archaeological and historical contexts of 12 postcontact sites reveals not only continuity with precontact traditions, but, increasingly, a greater concern with recording the changing circumstances of Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqey and Peskotomuhkati individuals and communities as they adapted to the challenges imposed and opportunities afforded by culture contact during the colonial period. Significantly, the authorship of petroglyphs appears to have broadened, and although the practice was rooted in precontact pictographic traditions, it was just one facet of a wider ‘pictographic literacy’ expressed across various media. Reflecting a broader suite of concerns than found in precontact traditions, much postcontact rock art relates to the social, economic, political and religious lives of men and women as they sought to retain access to hunting, gathering, and fishing territories and resources, negotiate the introduction of Christianity, adopt new technologies, and diversify their economies. The geographic distribution of postcontact rock art also reflects the impact of European settler colonialism, and the marginalisation and dislocation of Indigenous communities from ancestral territories, and their subsequent removal to reservations or else places located at the margins of the Euro-settler world. In these peripheral places, petroglyphs were markers of continued Indigenous presence, of individual and collective experience and memory, and represent a form of passive resistance to the assimilation and acculturation policies of successive colonial and, later, provincial governments. Today, rock art plays a significant and dynamic role in the revitalisation of cultural memory and identity for contemporary Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, and Peskotomuhkatiyik.

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