Acknowledgements
List of Tables
List of Figures
Chapter 1.Understanding Northern Iroquoians
Chapter 2. The Historical Development of Ancestral Wendat
Societies
Chapter 3. Situating the Mantle Site
Chapter 4. Community History
Chapter 5. The Necessities of Life
Chapter 6. Production, Consolidation, and Interregional
Interaction
Chapter 7. Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
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.
Archaeologists Birch (Univ. of Georgia) and Williamson
(Archaeological Services, Inc., Toronto) interpret the circa
1500-1530 CE Mantle site, located 30 miles east of Toronto,
Ontario. The seven-acre site was fully excavated due to potent
Ontario historic preservation laws. The authors situate Mantle well
by describing its historical and regional context and detailing the
coalescence and movement of the community (northern Iroquoian towns
moved periodically due to local resource depletion). They
demonstrate that Mantle's occupants came to view themselves as an
integrated social unit despite their origins in disparate small
villages a couple of generations earlier. The book presents
significant evidence for widespread warfare in the 15th century
(prior to Columbus) and a subsequent lull during Mantle's
occupation, which may be due to the formation of confederacies.
Mantle has also yielded some of the earliest known European-derived
artifacts in the interior Northeast. Descendants of Mantle's
occupants moved northwest at the end of the 16th century to become
part of the Wendat (also known as the Huron) confederacy. This book
reads like a history but is entirely derived from archaeological
evidence. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and
above.
*CHOICE*
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*
The Mantle Site: An Archaeological History of an Ancestral Wendat
Community is a welcome addition to the library of all
archaeologists interested in the dynamic history of Iroquoians in
the southern Great Lakes region as well as those investigating
coalescence. . . .This is an ambitious and interesting 'big
picture' book. . . .Birch and Williamson have clearly demonstrated
the dynamic nature of Iroquoian communities and the enormous
potential of the datasets provided in the context of cultural
resource management.
*Canadian Journal of Archaeology*
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*
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