Iroquoian Archaeology

Bamann, Susan; Kuhn, Robert J.; Molnar, James; Snow, Dean R.

doi:10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002251

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Contrary to these interpretations, Doolittle (1992Doolittle ( , 2000Doolittle ( , 2004, based on an analysis of the ethnohistorical record, suggested that Indigenous agriculture in eastern North America, including Northern Iroquoia, was intensive, rather than shifting or extensive. Historical, tropical swidden or slash-and-burn agriculture is often used as an analogy for prehistoric eastern North American agriculture (e.g., Bamann et al 1992;Creese 2016;Jones 2010;Snow 2012;Sykes 1980). Swidden fields are generally small and productive for only a few years.…”

Section: Soil Nitrogen and Indigenous Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

Resetting Archaeological Interpretations of Precontact Indigenous Agriculture: Maize Isotopic Evidence from Three Ancestral Mohawk Iroquoian Villages

Hart,

Winchell-Sweeney

2023

Am. Antiq.

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Archaeologists working in eastern North America typically refer to precontact and early postcontact Native American maize-based agriculture as shifting or swidden. Based on a comparison with European agriculture, it is generally posited that the lack of plows, draft animals, and animal manure fertilization resulted in the rapid depletion of soil nitrogen. This required Indigenous farmers to move their fields frequently. In Northern Iroquoia, depletion of soil fertility is frequently cited as one reason why villages were moved to new locations every 20 to 40 years. Recent analysis of δ15N ratios of maize macrobotanical remains from Northern Iroquoia, however, suggests that Iroquoian farmers were able to maintain soil nitrogen in their maize fields. An expanded analysis of maize kernel δ15N ratios from three ancestral Mohawk villages indicates that farmers from those villages maintained soil nitrogen throughout the occupational spans of their villages. It further suggests that precontact Iroquoian agronomy was consistent with contemporary conservation agriculture practices.

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Section: Soil Nitrogen and Indigenous Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

Resetting Archaeological Interpretations of Precontact Indigenous Agriculture: Maize Isotopic Evidence from Three Ancestral Mohawk Iroquoian Villages

Hart,

Winchell-Sweeney

2023

Am. Antiq.

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“…After about AD 1250–1300, the first longhouse villages emerged in the context of an increasing commitment to agriculture and year-round village life (Dodd et al 1990; Hart 2000). Although villages in this period were politically autonomous, distinctive forms of material culture and mortuary patterns suggest a certain amount of integration among and cultural differentiation between groups inhabiting subregional territories (Bamann et al 1992; Williamson and Robertson 1994). The emergence of longhouse-based social units may have coincided with the development of matrilineality and clan exogamy, which extended the social networks of kin-based groups (Trigger 1976).…”

Section: Northern Iroquoian Confederaciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Networks and Northern Iroquoian Confederacy Dynamics

Birch

Hart²

2017

Am. Antiq.

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The Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacies of northeastern North America are often presented as functionally equivalent political formations despite their having distinct cultural traits and unique geopolitical and developmental histories. In this article we employ social network analysis of collar decoration on ceramic vessels both to examine organizational differences in the social network that composed each group and to evaluate women's participation in political activities as potters who produced and transmitted social and political signals. The concept of social capital and the dimensions along which it varies are employed to understand variability in network statistics and topologies. Our results indicate that the Wendat confederacy formed a “complete” network characterized by bonding ties of social capital, whereas the Haudenosaunee confederacy was a “coalitional” network characterized by bridging ties. The results suggest that women's signaling networks were integral to how each confederacy functioned and the norms of reciprocity, trust, and information-sharing that defined each political formation.

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“…Village architecture was substantial and sometimes heavily fortified by wooden palisades and earthworks (Bamann et al 1992;Engelbrecht 2009). Large bark-covered longhouses were the normal form of semi-permanent domestic housing (Figs.…”

Section: Iroquoian Personhood and The Longhouse In The Seventeenth Cementioning

confidence: 99%

The Domestication of Personhood: a View from the Northern Iroquoian Longhouse

Creese

2012

CAJ

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This article examines how personhood was shaped in the routine dispositional relations of longhouse life among the Iroquoian societies of eastern North America. Drawing on scholarship that situates the emergence of culturally-specific modes of personhood within relational networks of people and things, I present evidence that over seven centuries, a deep resonance developed between the ‘polyvalence’ of Iroquoian domestic spaces and a broadly ‘fractal’ (sensu Fowler 2004) or ‘part-in-whole’ sense of personhood in Iroquoian societies. An ethnohistoric review of seventeenth-century Ontario Iroquoian concepts of personhood is followed by an archaeological analysis of the development of longhouses between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. I report the results of a kernel density estimation (KDE) analysis of the spatial distribution of post and pit features across longhouse living floors in a diachronic study of 45 hearth areas. The results indicate that everyday practices within the longhouse came to follow several characteristic patterns by the mid-twelfth century ad. These patterns served to define ‘polyvalent’ relationships in which resident persons and nuclear families were at once identifiable as distinct social atoms and as inextricable components of larger hypostatic wholes — most especially house and lineage. A fundamental coherence was thereby established between the embodied experience of domestic taskscapes and a mode of personhood in which any social whole was understood as a dynamic and partible alliance of elements.

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Iroquoian Archaeology

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Resetting Archaeological Interpretations of Precontact Indigenous Agriculture: Maize Isotopic Evidence from Three Ancestral Mohawk Iroquoian Villages

Resetting Archaeological Interpretations of Precontact Indigenous Agriculture: Maize Isotopic Evidence from Three Ancestral Mohawk Iroquoian Villages

Social Networks and Northern Iroquoian Confederacy Dynamics

The Domestication of Personhood: a View from the Northern Iroquoian Longhouse

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