Ojibwe cultural landscapes of Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota
LaBounty A. 2013. Ojibwe cultural landscapes of Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota. Park Science. 30(2):19-21
Archeology integrates new and existing data to understand how humans interacted with their environment, in both the recent and distant past. This article provides an example of research into human-environment interactions and insights into how resulting information can assist park managers across programs. Appreciation and preservation of Ojibwe cultural resources are a major focus of Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota. Stereo pairs of 1927 International Joint Commission aerial photography were compared to archeological site locations recorded over the last 30 years to identify more than 250 historical features. These features reveal otherwise isolated archeological sites as a system of contemporaneous and interrelated occupations. Through the identification of structural features and vegetation differences, Ojibwe archeological sites are newly associated with one another by trails, piers, portages, and other landscape features. By combining and overlaying these data in a GIS along with modern imagery, historical Ojibwe occupation can be better understood and interpreted by park staff as a complex and persistent cultural landscape spanning the lakes of Voyageurs National Park. The results of this research are therefore a combination of archeological and nonarcheological data sets, repurposed and recombined to the benefit of the park as a whole.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- LaBounty, Andrew
- Units
- MWAC , VOYA
- Keywords
- Cultural Landscape, Geographic Information System (GIS), homesteading, International Joint Commission, Logging, Midwest Archeological Center, Ojibwe, photographic analysis, stereoscope, Voyageurs National Park