Creating the Border: Defining, Enforcing and Reasserting Physical and Ethnic Borderzone Spaces during the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries in the Lake Champlain Richelieu River Valle

This dissertation examines the creation of space and place in a border region through a historically grounded, multi-scalar approach to spatiality. The work draws upon the pre- and post-contact archaeology of the Lake Champlain Richelieu River Corridor, a historically contested waterway where the states of Vermont, and New York meet the Canadian Province of Quebec. This is a region that has played host to countless complex cultural interactions between Native American/First Nation groups and Europeans of various cultural and national identities.;A tripartite model for multi-scalar study of space and place creation is presented and applied to the political and social history Native and European conflict and comprise. The model stipulates that the construction of space consists of three facets, cognitive, material and social spaces. The interaction between these three aspects of spatial creation allows for places to be constructed and identified as holding cultural significance.;The study is multi-scalar in respect to both scope of analysis and time. In respect to scope, archaeological analyses are undertaken at the region, site and artifact levels. The model is multiscalar in respect to time, examining the topics of study diachronically, tracing the production of space through time. Each temporally specific examination begins with a discussion of pertinent social mores and constructs as they effect the cognitive space created. The archaeological record is then analyzed to ascertain how cognitive spaces are manifest on the landscape. This built environment augmentation to the landscape is referred to as material space. Finally, the social space, consisting of the relationships between active agents and their material space is examined. The model postulates that it is the social space interactions between cognitive and material spaces that allows for the construction of place. The work often engages in critiques of an Anglo-centric bias in American history to offer a more balanced approach to the historical investigation of a complex borderzone.