<html>The Fur Trade in 16<sup>th</sup>-century Iroquoia: Results and Implications from Radiocarbon Dating at Two Tionontate Sites</html>
Author(s): Megan Conger
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "Building a Better Chronology for Fifteenth–Eighteenth-Century Eastern North America through Radiocarbon Dating and Collaborative Research Agendas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
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This paper presents the results of radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modeling at Sidey-Mackay and McQueen-McConnell, two Tionontate villages in southern Ontario, Canada, which demonstrate early-16<sup>th</sup> century Indigenous participation in the transatlantic fur trade. The Transatlantic fur trade was transformative in intertwining all aspects of European and Indigenous worlds during 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries in Northeastern North America. This trade, and the world-system it constituted, had roots in the norms and connections established by some of the earliest 16<sup>th</sup>-century European-Indigenous encounters on the North Atlantic Coast. The formalization of the fur trade by European powers in 1580 is used archaeologically as a chronological horizon marker, before which trade was more likely to be incidental or opportunistic. This paper argues that socioeconomic transformations to accommodate participation in the fur trade, particularly in the organization of labor and movement of populations, were enacted by Indigenous communities much earlier than this historically-derived date. Sidey-Mackay and McQueen-McConnell, previously thought to date to ca. AD 1580, are demonstrated to have been occupied as much as 70 years earlier. The implications of this chronological realignment are considered in the context of colonial narratives that center European economic power and minimize Indigenous agency in world-system expansion.
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Cite this Record
The Fur Trade in 16th-century Iroquoia: Results and Implications from Radiocarbon Dating at Two Tionontate Sites. Megan Conger. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509424)
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Abstract Id(s): 50418