The Mantle Site: An Archaeological History of an Ancestral Wendat Community [Paperback]

This is the first detailed analysis of a completely excavated northern Iroquoian community, a sixteenth-century ancestral Wendat village on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The site resulted from the coalescence of multiple small villages into one well-planned and well-integrated community. Jennifer Birch and Ronald F. Williamson frame the development of this community in the context of a historical sequence of site relocations. The social processes that led to its formation, the political and economic lives of its inhabitants, and their relationships to other populations in northeastern North America are explored using multiple scales of analysis. This book is key for those interested in the history and archaeology of eastern North America, the social, political, and economic organization of Iroquoian societies, the archaeology of communities, and processes of settlement aggregation.

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 cl³X