Date: 2018-01-01

Creator: Lillian Eckstein

Access: Open access

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Joseph B. Lancia

Access: Open access

My thesis discusses the cultural, political, and social dynamics of mountains with separate Indigenous and Western names and identities. Centering on Aoraki/Mount Cook—the highest peak in Aotearoa New Zealand—I integrate personal experiences as ethnographic data through narratives, mainly of my time hiking while studying abroad in New Zealand and during the two recent summers I spent exploring Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Through its name, Aoraki/Mt. Cook maintains Indigenous Māori and Western perspectives: Aoraki being a Māori atua (god) and Captain James Cook being a significant colonial figure in the Pacific. The slash upholds both identities while ensuring that they exist together. These dynamics are explored in depth and extended to mountains in places including Colorado, Alaska, and Australia. While discussing Rocky I rely heavily on Oliver Toll’s Arapaho Names & Trails (2003) which contains a substantial collection of Arapaho knowledge of the area and I give strong attention to Nesótaieux (Longs Peak and Mount Meeker). Additionally, I look at Mount Blue Sky, Denali, and Uluru/Ayers Rock to discuss mountains that have had formal name changes and how legacies are maintained through toponyms. With discussing varying identities and perceptions of each example and the knowledge held in names I encourage readers to do research into local Indigenous knowledges to further their and others’ understandings of places. I emphasize the concepts of historical silences, the revealing of knowledge, and the importance of language to articulate that Indigenous knowledge might be difficult to find but is never truly lost.

• Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Thomas Mazzuchi

Access: Embargoed

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Julia Elisabeth Perillo

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2017-05-01

Creator: Lara Bluhm

Access: Open access

This project investigates strategies for learning about prehistoric languages that have left no written records. It focuses upon the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family (the world’s largest by total speaking population, today including most of the languages between Iceland and India) and its associated speakers, who likely emerged during the Neolithic from someplace in eastern Europe or western Asia. There are two primary hypotheses regarding the origins of these languages and the so-called Indo-Europeans themselves. In one, it is argued that they arose via the expansion of agriculture out of Anatolia and into Europe, c. 5000 BC. The other, and leading, hypothesis suggests instead that the languages spread through migrations of highly mobile pastoralists outward from the Black Sea steppes at the end of the Neolithic, c. 3000 BC. This project will explore the developing interface between archaeology, genetics, and linguistics in prehistoric resarch. There are three main chapters: (1) some background and historical context about Indo-European studies; (2) an examination of methodological interaction among archaeology, linguistics, and genetics; and (3) a survey of various archaeological, genetic, and linguistic data as they pertain to the Indo-Europeans and the above two hypotheses of their origins.