The Shore is a Bridge: The Maritime Cul-tural Landscape of Lake Ontario

摘要

Ben Ford's The Shore is a Bridge: The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Lake Ontario is an ambitious book that makes important new contributions to our understanding of the history and archaeology of Lake Ontario, while raising the methodological bar for the study of North American coastal and marine archaeology. Well known for his scholarship in archaeology of maritime cultural landscapes, a burgeoning but loosely denned area of research, Ford consciously organized his book as "an argument for, and an example of" a maritime landscape approach to the study of the areas of interface between human activities on land and on the water. The opening sentence of the preface outlines Ford's central idea and intellectual agenda with a clarity rarely seen in scholarly volumes: "the history of the shore is seamless, withhumans moving easily from water to land, utilizing resources throughout, and the archaeology of the shore should likewise be seamless."The appropriateness and meaning of the book's title, while initially sounding a bit quixotic, is soon made clear. While the existing canon of scholarship and practice have created a division between land and maritime sites and cultures, Ford explains that "the shore thus forms a short bridge between maritime archaeology and terrestrial archaeology through the communication and transportation routes that radiate from the shoreline." By connecting land and water through the bridge of shore and maritime landscape, Ford states that his ultimate goal is to view lakemen and lake women as part of their Lake Ontario maritime cultures, and the maritime cultures as part of their larger societies."