Northern Iroquoian Conflict: From Coercive Adoption to Community Destruction in a Matter of Decades

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although the cause of the enmity between the Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee is unknown, it commenced in the late 1400s and intensified in the early to mid-1500s, impacting the north shore of Lake Ontario, eastern Ontario, the Ottawa Valley, and central New York. This is demonstrated by exceptional quantities of scattered and culturally modified human bone on Northern Iroquoian sites of that period. Hostilities escalated throughout the early to mid-1600s, as Europeans and Indigenous groups were all drawn into a complex geopolitical and economic web fuelled by competition for the trade in beaver pelts. What started as feuding characterized by revenge and adoption had, by Champlain’s era, turned into massive, coordinated parties of 1,000 warriors at a time, organized by nation but often carried out at a confederacy level. With time this cycle of violence became more intense and involved clear economic motives, such as attacks on fur brigades. In the 1640s, this violence culminates with the full-scale removal of competitors from the region by the Haudenosaunee. Herein, we examine organizational transformations in Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee conflict, the factors that resulted in Haudenosaunee military ascendancy, and the impact and legacy of these processes on early colonial North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35573.0