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

Abstract

To understand the nature of trade/exchange of ‘Basque’ copper kettles and their fragments among Indigenous communities from Québec to Ontario, Canada, we examined 948 copper samples from 75 archaeological sites. We found that 936 samples were sortable into 11 coarse chemical groups: seven biased towards Ontario, three favouring Québec and only one balanced between the two provinces. This pattern may represent kettles and pieces ‘mostly traded’ or ‘mostly kept’ by Indigenous groups within Québec. Chemical group distribution within individual provinces is complex. A tentative chronology of copper chemical groups provides additional insight into the complex trading/exchange patterns among the Indigenous groups of southern Ontario.

Contact-Era Chronology Building in Iroquoia: Age Estimates for Arendarhonon Sites and Implications for Identifying Champlain's Cahiagué

“…The Arendarhonon are noted in the ethnohistoric literature as being the first Wendat group to encounter the French and, in keeping with Wendat custom, gained the privilege of being the sole traders (Thwaites 1896–1901:10:225, 20:19). Although they were initially kinship based, early proprietary trading rights gave way to more extensive distribution as the volume of material increased, and the Huron-Wendat entered more fully into the expanding European world-system, as demonstrated by geochemical characterization of copper from early versus later contact period contexts (Pavlish et al 2018). The timing and tempo of this process and its variation between different Wendat communities are just several of the questions for which a refined absolute time frame for contact-era sites, as discussed here, would enable meaningful investigation.…”

“…Recent research on the chemical composition and distribution of trade copper has indicated that trade and exchange patterns among the Indigenous peoples in Québec and Ontario were more complex than was previously thought and that the population inhabiting the Ball site may have had preferential access to European material in the early contact era (Pavlish et al 2018). This research also recognizes that different communities had heterogeneous trading connections (see also Jones et al 2018), further supporting the need for chronology building that is independent of trade goods and the inherent assumptions involved in the associated scholarly tradition (see also Manning et al 2018).…”

Premodern Confederacies: Balancing Strategic Collective Action and Local Autonomy

“…In both cases, the confederacy structure acted to reduce transaction costs between member Nations during the early years of European colonization and later fur trade. However, both archaeological data (distributions of Europeanmanufactured goods) and oral history indicate that economic relationships differed from village to village suggesting that trade and exchange was a community-to-community affair rather than being managed at the confederacy level (Brandão, 1997:106;Pavlish et al, 2018;Birch et al, 2021).…”