Mantle Site

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.

• AcknowledgementsList of TablesList of FiguresChapter 1.Understanding Northern Iroquoians Chapter 2. The Historical Development of Ancestral Wendat Societies Chapter 3. Situating the Mantle SiteChapter 4. Community HistoryChapter 5. The Necessities of LifeChapter 6. Production, Consolidation, and Interregional InteractionChapter 7. ConclusionsBibliographyIndexAbout the Authors

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 confederacies. Mantle has also yielded some of the earliest known European-derived artifacts in the interior Northeast. Descendants of Mantle's occupants moved northwest at the end of the 16th century to become part of the Wendat (also known as the Huron) confederacy. This book reads like a history but is entirely derived from archaeological evidence. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.