Revisiting Facts and Ideas of Contact in the St. Lawrence Basin during the 16th Century

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brad Loewen.

In 1990, Charles Martijn proposed that Spanish Basques and St. Lawrence Iroquoians shared a ‘privileged trading partnership’ in the 16th century. This paper looks at two new fields of data that appear to support the Martijn hypothesis. The first considers the geopolitical struggle between France and Spain for control of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with reference to a crisis in Spanish Basque whaling in 1579 that may be related to the Iroquoian dispersal. The Basque crisis may have provided a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Cooper.

This paper examines the evidence for the earliest European contact among the Neutral Iroquoians, who in the seventeenth century occupied a large portion of southern Ontario, from Milton in the northwest extending through the Niagara Peninsula into New York State. Despite five decades of contact with Europeans, we do not know by what name this large amalgamation of tribes called themselves yet the first Europeans called them the Neutral. This referred to their position both politically and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Bourque.

The onset of European contact along the Maine-Maritime coast has been the subject of many varied scenarios for more than a century. Leaving aside the matter of Norse visitation, for which there is scant evidence at best, the region was first visited by Europeans during the late sixteenth century and then again in the early seventeenth. But the impacts of these visits upon indigenous peoples are difficult to assess historically and archaeologically because of the region’s proximity to the Gulf...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fox. Jean-Luc Pilon.

The distribution of European goods is reviewed for archaeological sites along these two major ‘highways’ to the west. Seventeenth archaeological evidence and historical data related to specific travel routes and Native community locations in what is now southeastern Ontario is used to reconstruct the sixteenth century evolution of Algonkian participation in the nascent fur trade.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michel Plourde.

Le XVIe siècle fut le théâtre des premières incursions européennes documentées dans l’’estuaire du Saint-Laurent, un riche environnement maritime exploité par des Iroquoiens du Saint-Laurent et des Algonquiens. L’’adhésion des Autochtones au commerce des fourrures allait engendrer des changements majeurs au sein de leurs sociétés. Quel portrait de ces événements marquants peut-on dresser à partir des sites archéologiques fouillés au cours des 20 dernières années ? / The 16th Century was the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Williamson. Meghan Burchell. William Fox. Sarah Grant.

Appearing on Great Lakes sites as early as Archaic times, marine shell artifacts are only present sporadically in southern Ontario, with the exception of rare mortuary contexts, until the sixteenth-century. By the end of the century, large numbers were entering Ontario as evident at the Skandatut site and its associated Kleinburg ossuary, thought to represent the last Wendat occupation of the Humber River drainage. The presence of European metal and beads made of steatite also increases with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Yves Pintal.

Over the past decades, archaeological works done on the North Shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence proved that the bountiful nature of this body of water grealty benefit to the local Natives. They settled early in spring along the shore and, among other things, captured an impressive amount of seals which allowed them to live for several weeks or even a few months at the same place. Because of that, some of these groups were among the first in the Northeast to witness the arrival of the Europeans....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-François Moreau.

Trigger suggested that a web of trade routes in the first half of the 17th century followed the St. Lawrence but also extended northward. New archaeological data since Trigger’s original work show that as soon as the French were present along the St. Lawrence at the beginning of the 17th century, east-west trade of European goods inland to the lower Great Lakes became regular as the fur trade was established. However, Trigger described a different pattern for the 16th century, that is a network...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Ransdeb.

In the Northeast, ‘contact’ refers to meetings between Aboriginal Americans and Western Europeans. But ‘contact’ is really a way of saying ‘contact-induced culture change’, since the key is not the meeting of two peoples, but the cultural changes that resulted. Thus the meetings between Norse and Aboriginal people in the far northeast over 4 centuries are not considered to mark the beginning of contact, whereas the visits of Cartier to the St. Lawrence over a period of a few months in 1534 are....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claude Chapdelaine.

Since the early development of anthropologically oriented St. Lawrence Iroquoian archaeology in the late 1960’s, the role of Jacques Cartier’s Iroquoians during the 16th Century has been at the center of several research questions, all looking for a better understanding of their dramatic disappearance. After reviewing the evidence of contact between Europeans and Iroquoians in the Canada and Hochelaga kingdoms, this paper will concentrate on the idea of a passive versus an active attitude of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James W. Bradley.

Cross-cultural interactions, among Native peoples as well as with Europeans, were a hallmark of the 16th century in the St. Lawrence Basin and adjacent drainages. This paper proposes some structural ways for examining these complex interactions and summarizes recent research pertaining to the Five Nations Iroquois and the Susquehannock. Particular emphasis is placed on how three classes of high-value material - marine shell, copper and red stone - can be used to probe these dynamics.