Kinship, Clanship, and the Incorporation of Newcomers in Northern Iroquoian Society

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, we consider how institutions of social relatedness played crucial roles in Huron-Wendat society and how categories of biological and fictive kinship (e.g., lineages, clans, nations) structured processes of social integration, political affiliation, and adoption. We argue that flexibility in categories of social relatedness conferred an adaptive benefit on Iroquoian societies during the late precontact and early contact eras. We then use this framework to analyze data related to the relocation of populations from the St. Lawrence valley and their incorporation into neighboring communities and Nations during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Data on the distributions and frequencies of characteristic St. Lawrence Iroquoian artifacts on village sites in Ontario, Canada are utilized to infer the scale of population movement and processes of incorporation. We argue that the circumstances governing population movement worked in concert with institutions of social relatedness to facilitate the integration of St. Lawrence newcomers into Huron-Wendat social and settlement structures. As such, we argue that interpretive frameworks that explicitly incorporate categories and institutions of relatedness with traditional material culture analyses can shed new light on the incorporation of newcomers into middle-range societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24976