This is the first detailed analysis of a completely excavated northern Iroquoian community, a sixteenth-century ancestral Wendat village on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The site resulted from the coalescence of multiple small villages into one well-planned and well-integrated community. Jennifer Birch and Ronald F. Williamson frame the development of this community in the context of a historical sequence of site relocations. The social processes that led to its formation, the political and economic lives of its inhabitants, and their relationships to other populations in northeastern North America are explored using multiple scales of analysis. This book is key for those interested in the history and archaeology of eastern North America, the social, political, and economic organization of Iroquoian societies, the archaeology of communities, and processes of settlement aggregation.
Approximately seventy-five prehistoric sites and nearly fifty historic or recent camps are reported in the areas north and west of Great Bear Lake. Collections are small and in most cases superficial, but groupings and periodization are attempted.
This report contains brief summaries of the archaeological salvage projects undertaken by the Salvage Section, Archaeological Survey of Canada, in the summer of 1972.