Kisha Supernant

Radiocarbon test for demographic events in written and oral history

Significance Indigenous oral traditions remain a very controversial source of historical knowledge in Western scientific, humanistic, and legal traditions. Likewise, demographic models using radiocarbon-based simulation methods are controversial. We rigorously test the historicity of indigenous Tsimshian oral records (adawx) using an extended simulation-based method. Our methodology is able to detect short-duration (1–2 centuries) demographic events. First, we successfully test the methodology against a simulated radiocarbon dataset for the catastrophic European Black Death/bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis). Second, we test the Tsimshian adawx accounts of an occupational hiatus in their territorial heartland ca. 1,500–1,000 years ago. We are unable to disconfirm the oral accounts. This represents the first formal test of indigenous oral traditions using modern radiocarbon modeling techniques. We extend an established simulation-based method to test for significant short-duration (1–2 centuries) demographic events known from one documented historical and one oral historical context. Case study 1 extrapolates population data from the Western historical tradition using historically derived demographic data from the catastrophic European Black Death/bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis). We find a corresponding statistically significant drop in absolute population using an extended version of a previously published simulation method. Case study 2 uses this refined simulation method to test for a settlement gap identified in oral historical records of descendant Tsimshian First Nations communities from the Prince Rupert Harbour region of the Pacific Northwest region of British Columbia, Canada. Using a regional database of n = 523 radiocarbon dates, we find a significant drop in relative population using the extended simulation-based method consistent with Tsimshian oral records. We conclude that our technical refinement extends the utility of radiocarbon simulation methods and can provide a rigorous test of demographic predictions derived from a range of historical sources.

Social Mobility: Charting the Economic Topography of Urban Space

This project on economic topographies is one of eight thematic ways in which the research group Edmonton Pipelines is remapping the neighborhood of Rossdale. The essay brings together poetry, data visualization, and technologies of mapping to analyze how the twin vectors of capitalism and colonialism have created Western Canadian cityspace. Rather than taking for granted the ups and downs of the built environment, the article muses on the possibilities of using haunting as an urban interface. Working through this metaphorical possibility concretely, this essay traces the contours of haunting in the case of Rossdale, a Canadian neighborhood that has undergone an emblematic form of gentrification. We develop literal topographical maps as a way of conceptualizing metaphorical hurdles to belonging to settler colonial cities. These socioeconomic topographical maps serve as a new form of urban cartography.