Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780759121010

Table of Contents

Reviews

Birch and Williamson have synthesized an enormous quantity of data to produce a compelling narrative. They... have produced a work that enlarges our understanding of past Iroquoians and their world. -- William Engelbrecht, Buffalo State College, State University of New York The Iroquoian nations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been vastly different just a few generations earlier. They changed profoundly-before European contact. Only archaeology can find this earlier and deeper history. In The Mantle Site, Birch and Williamson reconstruct how Iroquoian people came together, invented, and put into practice new kinds of social communities, new political orders, new ways of making a living, and new customs. So much for the notion of timeless tradition and peoples with no history. The Mantle Site is far more than a splendid study of one village. [T]his history is not just an Iroquoian story, because how people create new ways of coming together as political communities has something to say to us all. -- Steve Kowalewski, University of Georgia The authors produce an invaluable study that has much broader significance to understanding cultural development in late precolumbian North America and the methods and theory we use to gain that understanding. The authors first establish a theoretical framework based in practice and structuration and promote two important approaches: community-focused research and working with descendant stakeholders. These approaches drive the research and are ingrained into the analyses and interpretations, and the book is much stronger for having such noble, consistent themes. ... This work is at its best when Birch and Williamson analyze and interpret the Mantle site data to describe community life and its changes over time. They expertly integrate multiple lines of data and strike the proper balance of theorizing without stretching the data too far. ... The many strengths of this work include the thorough and painstaking research, the beautiful integration of method and theory, and, most importantly, the execution of multiscalar research focused on the community... This work will make a lasting contribution to the study of Iroquoian cultures and to the study of settlement coalescence. It will quickly take its place among the other influential site monographs from North America because of its ability to help us better understand the evolution of late precolumbian Native American societies. American Antiquity

Author Information

Jennifer Birch is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia. Ronald F. Williamson is founder and managing partner of Archaeological Services Inc., a cultural resource management firm based in Toronto.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available