Christopher Carr
Professor
Ph.D., Archaeology, University of Michigan
SHESC Themes: Culture, Heritage and Identity; Urban Societies
Field Specializations: Art, Archaeology, Materials Analyses, Mortuary Practices, Religion,
Small-Scale Societies, Social and Political Organization, Style
Regional Focus: North America (Midcontinent)
Contact: Christopher Carr, SHESC 204
Research:
Christopher Carr is an archaeologist with primary interest in the prehistory of eastern North America, especially the social organizations, rituals and belief systems of tribal peoples of the Midwest from about 1000 B.C. to Contact. To reconstruct these aspects of their lifeways, he focuses on their mortuary practices and art. His research makes strong use of anthropological theories about the causes of development of tribal and rank social organization from simpler social systems. It also has involved the development of archaeological theory about how mortuary practices and artistic style reflect social and political structures and processes.
Within this range of subjects, Carr's work over the past decade has aimed particularly at revealing the nature of Hopewell society, ritual and religion in the Ohio area, between 50 B.C. and A.D. 350. He and a team of archaeologists under his direction (Carr 2005) have been able to make very fine-grained descriptions of the lifeways of Hopewell peoples, including their diverse and complementary forms of leadership, the sacred shaman-like and secular power bases and formalization over time; their animal-totemic clan organization and the relative sizes, prestige and leadership qualities of different clans; variation in kinship structures among Hopewell societies; several sodalities, which had complementary ritual functions; differences among genders in their roles, prestige, work loads and health; the organization of Hopewell communities; intercommunity alliances that involved burying their dead together in common cemeteries in each other's territories and interregional travels of Hopewell peoples in the quest for power in nature, healing, tutelage in knowledge and rituals and when making pilgrimages.
Carr also is making extensive reconstructions of the religious beliefs, and especially the cosmologies, of Adena and Hopewell peoples of the Ohio area, with continuities and changes in them over time into the Mississippian and Historic periods. Some aspects of the Adena and Hopewell cosmoses that he has revealed through art works and mortuary practices include different, vertically positioned worlds of existence; the natural and nonordinary creatures that inhabited those worlds; the nature of the pathway (axis mundi) among the worlds; directional systems and pathways to one or more afterlives.
Carr works extensively with the analytical technologies of material science in studying the art and artifacts of Hopewellian peoples for social and religious reasons, and has played a leading role in adapting some technologies to archaeology. The techniques and materials include electron microprobe, X-radiography, petrography and AMS carbon dating of ceramics; EDX spectrometry, microprobe, and Raman microspectrometry of metals and pigments and color and infrared digital imaging and image enhancement of art works. Currently, he is renewing the details of portraits of Hopewell leaders and images of creatures that Hopewell artists patinated on copper artifacts.
Research Project:
The Hopewell Ancient Native American Societies Project
Select Publications:
Carr, C. & Winkelman, M. (2006). Teaching about shamanism and religious healing: A cross-cultural, bio-psych-social-spiritual approach. In L. L. Barnes & I. M. Talamantez (Eds.), Teaching religion and healing (pp. 171-190). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carr, C. & Case, D. T. (2005). Gathering Hopewell: Society, ritual, and ritual interaction. New York: Kluwer Academic Press.
Cotkin, S. J. & Carr, C. (1999). Analysis of slips and other inorganic surface materials on woodland and early fort ancient vessels. American Antiquity, 64(2), 316-343.
Carr, C. (1995). Mortuary practices: Their social, philosophical-religious, circumstantial, and physical determinants. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2(2), 105-200.
Carr, C. & Komorowski, J. C. (1995). Identifying the mineralogy of rock temper in ceramics with x-radiography. American Antiquity, 60(4), 723-749.
Carr, C. & Neitzel, J. E. (1995). Style, society, and person: Archaeological and ethnological perspectives. New York: Plenum Publishing Corporation.