This volume describes the activities of the Archaeological Survey of Canada, National Museum of Man, for the years 1980 and 1981. / Un rapport sur les activités du Commission archéologique du Canada, Musée national de l’Homme pendant les années 1980 à 1981.
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.
Over the past century and a half, Canadian archaeology rehabilitated large portions of a history once thought to be lost beyond recovery. This book is among the first to document and analyze the growth of archaeology in Canada.
During the occupation of this site, a lowering of the Lake Huron water level resulted in dramatic ecological changes that are clearly reflected in the subsistence pattern of the Archaic hunters and fishermen. Cultural continuity is seen to exist from the Archaic (Inverhuron Archaic) through the Initial Woodland (Saugeen culture) periods and an unbroken tradition, referred to as the Inverhuron tradition, is proposed with a time span of more than 1,600 years.
