scholarly journals Fish and maize: Bayesian mixing models of fourteenth- through seventeenth-century AD ancestral Wendat diets, Ontario, Canada

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Feranec ◽  
John P. Hart

Abstract Freshwater and marine fish have been important components of human diets for millennia. The Great Lakes of North America, their tributaries and smaller regional freshwater bodies are important Native American fisheries. The ethnohistorical record, zooarchaeological remains, and isotopic values on human bone and tooth collagen indicate the importance of fish in fourteenth- through seventeenth-century ancestral Wendat diets in southern Ontario, which is bordered by three of the Great Lakes. Maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) was the primary grain of Native American agricultural systems in the centuries prior to and following sustained European presence. Here we report new Bayesian dietary mixing models using previously published δ13C and δ15N values on ancestral Wendat bone and tooth collagen and tooth enamel. The results confirm previous estimates from δ13C values that ancestral Wendat diets included high proportions of maize but indicate much higher proportions of fish than has previously been recognized. The results also suggest that terrestrial animals contributed less to ancestral Wendat diets than is typically interpreted based on zooarchaeological records.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Birkel ◽  
Alicia Correa Barahona ◽  
Clément Duvert ◽  
Sebastián Granados Bolaños ◽  
Andres Chavarría Palma ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Brock A. Giordano ◽  
Michael S. Nassaney

The study of craft production in the context of Native American–European interactions during the eighteenth century in the western Great Lakes region has emerged as a topic of scholarly interest. An analysis of tinkling cone production both demonstrates how European raw materials were being transformed into new forms and reveals how labor was organized. By examining the technological histories of tinkling cones, this chapter illustrates that their production was conducted in independent workshops as an opportunistic activity that fit the demands of life on the colonial frontier at Fort St. Joseph.


Author(s):  
William Beinart ◽  
Lotte Hughes

The Atlantic world became Britain’s main early imperial arena in the seventeenth century. Subsequent to Ireland, North America and the Caribbean were the most important zones of British settler colonialism. At the northern limits of settlement, around the Atlantic coast, the St Lawrence River, the Great Lakes and on the shores of the Hudson Bay, cod fisheries and fur-trading networks were established in competition with the French. This intrusion, while it had profound effects on the indigenous population, was comparatively constrained. Secondly, British settlements were founded in colonial New England from 1620. Expanding agrarian communities, based largely on family farms, displaced Native Americans, while the ports thrived on trade and fisheries. In the hotter zones to the south, both in the Caribbean and on the mainland, slave plantations growing tropical products became central to British expansion. Following in Spanish footsteps, coastal Virginia was occupied in 1607 and various Caribbean islands were captured from the 1620s: Barbados in 1627, and Jamaica in 1655. The Atlantic plantation system was shaped in part by environment and disease. But these forces cannot be explored in isolation from European capital and consumption, or the balance of political power between societies in Europe, Africa, and America. An increase in European consumer demand for relatively few agricultural commodities—sugar, tobacco, cotton, and to a lesser extent ginger, coffee, indigo, arrowroot, nutmeg, and lime—drove plantation production and the slave trade. The possibility of providing these largely non-essential additions for British consumption arose from a ‘constellation’ of factors ‘welded in the seventeenth century’ and surviving until the mid-nineteenth century, aided by trade protectionism. This chapter analyses some of these factors and addresses the problem of how much weight can be given to environmental explanations. Plantations concentrated capital and large numbers of people in profoundly hierarchical institutions that occupied relatively little space in the newly emerging Atlantic order. In contrast to the extractive enterprise of the fur trade, this was a frontier of agricultural production, which required little involvement from indigenous people. On some islands, such as Barbados, Spanish intrusions had already decimated the Native American population before the British arrived; there was little resistance.


2008 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott W. J. Martin

Archaeological accounts of the spread of agriculture tend to favor either (im)migration/demic diffusion or in situ development/stimulus diffusion. Having moved away from the early twentieth-century's community-wide migration model for Iroquoian origins in the Lower Great Lakes region and southern Ontario in particular, orthodox archaeological belief over the past half-century had come to place Northern Iroquoian speakers in the area since at least 2,000 years ago and likely much earlier. In what appear to be modified versions of the older migrationist arguments, contemporary thought within archaeology once more seems to allow that wholesale relocations were responsible for bringing farming into the region. It has been suggested, for example, that Northern Iroquoian speakers entered southern Ontario as recently as the early or middle centuries of the first millennium A.D. In this paper, I recount the routes this debate has taken and show that the appearance of maize (Zea mays) agriculture, alongside a few other materials, has come to be bound up with documenting the arrival of Northern Iroquoian-speaking communities. I conclude by reiterating the cautions advised by a number of researchers for how we read past ethnicity from archaeological materials and the role this plays in contemporary political discourse between First Nations and others.


1967 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. D. Dondale

The mating behaviors of Philodromus rufus-like spiders from the Pacific coast, northern Ontario, and southern Ontario near Belleville revealed two species and a subspecies. P. rufus Walckenaer is identified as a transcontinental species in which the males vibrate their legs in courtship and possess an "angular" retro-lateral apophysis on the palpal tibia. P. rufus vibrans Dondale is a small, heavily-speckled subspecies of rufus. The second species is P. exilis Banks, in which the males do not vibrate and have a "non-angular" apophysis, and which occurs in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence-Acadian forests of eastern North America.


Ecosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zaria Torres‐Poché ◽  
Miguel A. Mora ◽  
Thomas W. Boutton ◽  
Michael E. Morrow

2019 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Sanger ◽  
Brian D. Padgett ◽  
Clark Spencer Larsen ◽  
Mark Hill ◽  
Gregory D. Lattanzi ◽  
...  

Analysis of human remains and a copper band found in the center of a Late Archaic (ca. 5000–3000 cal BP) shell ring demonstrate an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed based on “down-the-line” models of exchange. These findings challenge prevalent notions that view preagricultural Native American communities as relatively isolated from one another and suggest instead that wide social networks spanned much of North America thousands of years before the advent of domestication.


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