17th century Huron village life: insights from the copper-based metals of the Ball site, southern Ontario, Canada

Tracing the Distribution of Late 16th and Early 17th Century European Copper Artefacts in Southern Québec and Ontario, Canada

“…This sorting process resulted in 11 coarse chemical groupings of 936 samples, and 12 isolates (single‐member chemical groups). The coarse groupings were labelled E1–E9, to be consistent with the chemical group labelling in Michelaki et al (, ), as well as U1 and U2, where U indicates ‘previously unknown’.…”

“…It is therefore not unreasonable to propose that members of the Wendat/Algonquin village that is now the Ball site (Fox ) could have been the primary ones to transport kettles, or parts of them, trading along the way with members of various allied tribes. This would explain the high concentration of copper artefacts at the Ball site (Fox ; Michelaki et al ) and in the Abitibi region of Québec (Fig. ), and the smattering of related artefacts along their route.…”

“…Group E6 is most abundant among the non‐Ball Wendat sites. This is interesting given that group E6 was proposed to be one of the earliest copper chemistries to arrive at the Ball village (Michelaki et al ). It may also be of some importance that, while no U1 groups are present at the Ball and Abitibi sites, four samples appeared at non‐Ball Wendat sites.…”

“…Being able to anchor chemical groups chronologically would help alleviate some of the difficulties. Michelaki et al () had proposed a potential copper chronology for the copper material recovered from the Ball site, observing whether chemical groups appeared mainly in the earlier or the later components of the site.…”

“…Here, we combine the proposed Ball site copper (Michelaki et al ) with current best estimates of the glass bead periods of the southern Ontario archaeological sites, and with the chemistry distributions that we have described in this paper, to suggest an updated version of a potential copper chemistry chronology (Table ). It is not a sharply focused chronology, since the data are qualitative to semi‐quantitative, and we know from glass bead studies that items of importance were taken from one village to the next in the 10–30 year village relocation practices of the Indigenous peoples (e.g., Sempowski et al ).…”