Geochemistry of Ancestral Mi’kmaw Ceramics from Southern Mainland Nova Scotia: Constraints on Pottery Pathways

English Abstract:

The mineralogy and bulk chemical compositions of 33 potsherds (14 shell-tempered, 19 grit-tempered) and local sediments (sand and clay, where present) from six ancestral Mi’kmaw sites across southern mainland Nova Scotia were determined, and are compared to samples from a long-used aboriginal site near Pinkey’s Point at the mouth of Bear River (BdDk-1), in the Annapolis Basin. Mineralogical criteria link several of the sherds to local raw materials (e.g., grit); biotite has the same range of X_Mg values, and monazite similar Ce:Nd:La ratios, as the same minerals in nearby Devonian granitoid rocks, and rare garnets have morphologies and compositions consistent with those found in these granitoid rocks and their metasedimentary host rocks. The presence of biotite granodiorite clasts (and their mineralogical constituents) in the grit-tempered potsherds from the sites described here link this pottery to the Bear River/Annapolis Basin area. This inference is supported by multidimensional scaling (MDS) of the bulk compositional data for the sample suite. Shell-tempered samples, however, lack the granodiorite clasts that largely control the trace element signature of the grit-tempered samples, so they are geochemically distinct even where evaluated exclusive of shell components (Ca, Sr). Although we cannot discount an Annapolis Basin origin for them, geochemically, this linkage remains tenuous. We postulate that granodiorite-tempered pottery from the Annapolis Basin was distributed to other sites in the province via navigable waterways, including the the Mersey River corridor southeast to the Atlantic coast, and the Annapolis River to the northeast.