Collections & Research Staff
Christopher Watts
Rebanks Postdoctoral Fellow in New World Archaeology
B.A., Anthropology and Native Studies, Trent University, 1995
M.Sc., Anthropology (Archaeology), University of Toronto, 1997
Ph.D., Anthropology (Archaeology), University of Toronto, 2006
Dr. Watts is an archaeologist who specializes in material culture studies, ceramic artifacts and technologies, as well as theory and philosophy. His research focuses on the First Peoples of Northeastern North America, particularly the Late Woodland Traditions of the lower Great Lakes region.
Dr. Watts became interested in archaeology as a teenager when he enrolled in a field school at the Seed-Barker site, a 16th century ancestral Huron village located in Woodbridge, Ontario. Later, as an undergraduate at Trent University, he took numerous courses involving the archaeology of the Americas as well as the history and ethnography of Canada’s First Peoples. After deciding on a career in archaeology and working as a summer student on various projects for the ROM, the Ontario Ministry of Culture and Archaeological Services Inc., Dr. Watts elected to pursue graduate work at the University of Toronto. His doctoral research, which was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship along with several University of Toronto Fellowships, was concerned with the potting practices of Iroquoian and Algonquian groups in southwestern Ontario between ca. AD 900 and 1300 and built upon an earlier, Masters-based study of ceramics from the region.
At a conceptual level, Dr. Watts’s work often considers how social life occurs through rather than around material culture. He notes how things do more than simply accompany us through life: they furnish us, from a young age, with an understanding and mediation of the world long before mental representation and ‘objective’ thought takes place. As such, things shape, and in turn are shaped by, the nature and extent of common action within the world. Dr. Watts has explored these ideas in the archaeology of the lower Great Lakes region through papers involving pottery production and Iroquoian longhouse life, and in the courses he teaches as a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. As a Rebanks Fellow, Dr. Watts continues to expand upon this work through a study of Iroquoian effigy pipes and other artifacts in the ROM’s collections. He is also developing a new program of field research in southern Ontario and has several proposals in the works for First Peoples Gallery exhibits.
Publications
| In Press | Childhood Diet and Western Basin Tradition Foodways at the Krieger Site, Southwestern Ontario, Canada (with Christine White and Fred Longstaffe). American Antiquity 76 (3). |
| In Prep. | Iroquoian Depositional Practices and the Making of Social Memory (with Ron Williamson). |
| In Review | Points of Passage / Points of View: Iroquoian Animal Effigy Pipes and the Crossing of Corporeal Borders. Ms. submitted to American Anthropologist |
| 2009 | Coming to our Senses: Toward a Unified Perception of the Iroquoian Longhouse. In Archaeology and the Politics of Vision in a Post-Modern Context, edited by J. Thomas and V. Jorge, pp. 209-224. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. |
| 2008 | On Mediation and Material Agency in the Peircean Semeiotic. In Material Agency: Toward a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, edited by C. Knappett and L. Malafouris, pp. 187-207. Springer, New York. |
| 2008 | Pot/Potter Entanglements and Networks of Agency in Late Woodland (c. AD 900-1300) Southwestern Ontario, Canada. British Archaeological Reports International Series 1828. Archaeopress, Oxford. |
| 2007 | From Purification to Mediation: Overcoming Artifactual 'Otherness' with and in Actor-Network Theory. Journal of Iberian Archaeology 9/10:39-54. |
Galleries
Daphne Cockwell Gallery of Canada: First Peoples
ROM Images
Canadian First Peoples
Other Links
University of Toronto Department of Anthropology
Contact Information
Department of World Cultures
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen's Park
Toronto, ON
M5S 2C6
Fax: 416.586.5877
E-mail: World Cultures
Dr. Christopher Watts in the David Boyle Room, the home of New World Archaeology collections.
Iroquoian effigy pipe (ca. AD 1450-1600) on display in the First Peoples Gallery and depicted in the Annual Archaeological Report, Ontario (1897-1898).
