Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Mormon and Irish Landscapes on Beaver Island, Lake Michigan – niche construction and socio-ecological inheritance in the nineteenth century

Mormon and Irish Landscapes on Beaver Island, Lake Michigan – niche construction and... Beaver Island, Michigan was a unique settlement location for Irish America in the late nineteenth century. Families of Irish descent migrated to northern Lake Michigan and reproduced many aspects of the rural, fishing and farming lifeways of Ireland. They had to negotiate the cultural landscape and material conditions that had previously been established on the island, notably by a Mormon sect that occupied the island between 1848 and 1856. The inheritance of landscapes by one community from another can be understood through the concept of niche construction theory. This can be used as a lens to understand how the Mormons shaped their cultural landscape and what this meant for the socio-ecological legacy taken over by their Irish replacements. We also notice the Irish influence on the Beaver Island Lumber Company who came after them. Utilising archaeological and historical data, we undertake a macro-analysis to investigate the shaping of structures and landscapes as interactive influences of one cultural group on another across time. Each new group selectively utilised aspects of the extant ecology and built environment according to their own needs and worldviews, and thus transformed the island's landscapes again for subsequent inhabitants. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Landscapes Taylor & Francis

Mormon and Irish Landscapes on Beaver Island, Lake Michigan – niche construction and socio-ecological inheritance in the nineteenth century

Rotman, Deborah L.; Fuentes, Agustín
Landscapes , Volume 17 (1): 20 – Jan 2, 2016
Download PDF
20 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/mormon-and-irish-landscapes-on-beaver-island-lake-michigan-niche-r9zncoeOxA

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
ISSN
2040-8153
eISSN
1466-2035
DOI
10.1080/14662035.2016.1169039
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Beaver Island, Michigan was a unique settlement location for Irish America in the late nineteenth century. Families of Irish descent migrated to northern Lake Michigan and reproduced many aspects of the rural, fishing and farming lifeways of Ireland. They had to negotiate the cultural landscape and material conditions that had previously been established on the island, notably by a Mormon sect that occupied the island between 1848 and 1856. The inheritance of landscapes by one community from another can be understood through the concept of niche construction theory. This can be used as a lens to understand how the Mormons shaped their cultural landscape and what this meant for the socio-ecological legacy taken over by their Irish replacements. We also notice the Irish influence on the Beaver Island Lumber Company who came after them. Utilising archaeological and historical data, we undertake a macro-analysis to investigate the shaping of structures and landscapes as interactive influences of one cultural group on another across time. Each new group selectively utilised aspects of the extant ecology and built environment according to their own needs and worldviews, and thus transformed the island's landscapes again for subsequent inhabitants.

Journal

Landscapes – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jan 2, 2016

Keywords: Irish; immigration; Michigan; nineteenth century; niche construction

References

  • The Home “Place”: Center and Periphery in Irish House and Family Systems
  • The rise and fall of the fishing industry
  • Mormon land policy on Beaver Island
  • The Irish immigration to Beaver Island
  • Pre-Mormon settlement on Beaver Island, 1837–1852
  • The remaking of Irish America, 1845–1880
  • Human evolution, niche complexity, and the emergence of a distinctively human imagination
  • Integrative anthropology and the human niche: toward a contemporary approach to human evolution
  • Niche construction through cooperation, a nonlinear dynamics contribution to modeling facets of the evolutionary history of the genus Homo
  • Beaver Island, Michigan, an Irish island colony
  • Notes on island logging
  • Beaver Islanders 1848–1856, the extraordinary among the ordinary
  • Gathering insights on isolation
  • On the distinction between evolution and history
  • Beyond biology and culture, the meaning of evolution in a relational world
  • Names and places
  • Resistance and compliance: CRM and the archaeology of the African diaspora
  • Cultural niche construction and human learning environments, investigating sociocultural perspectives
  • Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus
  • Niche construction on Bali, the gods of the countryside
  • The influence of social niche on cultural niche construction: modelling changes in belief about marriage form in Taiwan
  • Representing Colonizers: an archaeology of creolization, ethnogenesis, and indigenous material culture among the Haida
  • Genes, culture, and agriculture, an example of human niche construction
  • History of Holy Cross Parish
  • ‘The Fighting Irish’, historical archaeology of 19th-century Catholic immigrant experiences in South Bend, Indiana
  • Irish-Catholic immigrant life in South Bend, Indiana, refined earthenwares and the 19th-century social worlds of the Midwest
  • Urban archaeology at the site of the Argosy Casino: the materiality of social change in the canal town of Lawrenceburg, Indiana
  • Fitting into a new place - Irish immigrant experiences in shaping a Canadian landscape
  • Spatial dimensions of gendered social relations, comparative analyses of domestic households, Beaver Island, Michigan and Árainn Mhór, Co. Donegal
  • The kingdom of St. James and 19th-century American utopianism