Wrapped in foil or tucked into plastic bags, bits of wood charcoal, carbonized corn and seeds that have sat in museum drawers for years are now getting re-examined by researchers seeking answers to a great enigma in Canadian history.
Thanks to improved technical and statistical methods, these academics want to uncover what happened to the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, the Indigenous people who lived on the island of Montreal and along the river banks at the time Europeans first ventured into the continent’s mainland.
A traditional longhouse at the Hôtel Musée in Wendake, a Huron reserve enclave within Quebec City.FRANCIS VACHON/The Canadian Press
When the French explorer Jacques Cartier first set foot in what is now Montreal, in 1535, he said more than 1,000 people greeted him warmly at a place called Hochelaga, a village of bark-covered longhouses surrounded by a palisade.
Cartier’s encounter with the Iroquoians has been retold in history books, rendered in paintings and re-enacted on film for Heritage Minutes. But Hochelaga was gone by the time other Europeans showed up.
“The quote-unquote disappearance of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians holds a particular place in the Canadian historical imagination,” University of Georgia archeologist Jennifer Birch said in an interview.
Dr. Birch is the principal investigator for the Dating Iroquoia project, which strives to understand what happened to those Iroquoians.
She said she applied quote marks to the word “disappearance” because the Iroquoians didn’t just vanish but more accurately scattered and eventually assimilated into other nations.
Historians think one or several factors might have caused this: warfare with other Indigenous people, infectious diseases brought by Europeans and crop failure caused by the Little Ice Age.
This dispersal took place during the half-century gap between Cartier’s visit and the arrival of his nephew Jacques Noël, who sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1583 or 1585, according to another project participant, University of Montreal archeologist Christian Gates St-Pierre.
He said the St. Lawrence Iroquoians share common traits – matrilineal societies, longhouses, farming corn – with Indigenous people such as the Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee, whose members include the Mohawks. Some Mohawk and Wendat scholars say that the St. Lawrence Iroquoians were their ancestors.
Dr. Carla Hadden, from the University of Georgia’s Center for Applied Isotopic Studies and the Dating Iroquoia project, prepares a maize kernel for radiocarbon dating.Jennifer Birch/Supplied
Dating Iroquoia features two attributes of contemporary archeology: using better technology to tease out new insights from previously excavated objects, and co-operation with the Indigenous people whose forebears are being studied.
Dr. Birch said the project is conducted in collaboration with the Huron-Wendat nation and samples from past archeological digs will be analyzed with less intrusive, more precise carbon-14 dating techniques.
Carbon-14, a mildly radioactive form of the common chemical element, is present in the air and gets absorbed into the bodies of all humans, plants and animals while they’re alive. After they die, the carbon-14 in them gradually decays. Archeologists can calculate the age of an ancient plum pit, a piece of wood or a bone by finding how much radioactive carbon is left in them.
The project has measured carbon-14 levels in corn kernels, nuts and even individual strawberry seeds, Dr. Birch said.
Results need to be calibrated because atmospheric carbon-14 levels have fluctuated over time. The project uses Bayesian modelling, a statistical method that adjusts radiocarbon dates by factoring in prior information; for example, wood-charcoal samples whose age can be pinpointed via their distinctive tree rings.
Dr. Sturt Manning and Dr. Brita Lorentzen selecting samples from collections found in archeological sites in the St. Lawrence Valley.Jennifer Birch/Supplied
The idea for the project began when Dr. Birch and Cornell University archeologist Sturt Manning applied these enhanced methods on samples from the Jean-Baptiste Lainé site, near Toronto, a Huron-Wendat village thought to be from the early 1500s. The radiocarbon measurements yielded instead a date range between 1590 and 1615.
Realizing that the site was occupied decades later than previously believed, Dr. Birch recalled thinking, “What about all of these other village sites on the north shore of Lake Ontario?”
Next, they tested items from 42 sites in Ontario and New York State. The resulting chronology reshaped past assumptions. The first Huron-Wendat villages to set up defensive palisades were located in their territory’s periphery, indicating this stemmed from an external threat, attacks from the Haudenosaunee, rather than from internal conflict.
A collection of artifacts, including, bone tools, projectile points and pipes, found in a 500-year-old Iroquoian village in Stouffville, Ont.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
The project’s second phase focuses on the fate of the historic Iroquoians, by carbon dating material from sites along the St. Lawrence valley, from Eastern Ontario to the confluence with the Saguenay River.
Researchers hope that by determining more precisely when these sites were occupied, they will be able to ascertain at what time and in which directions Iroquoian communities relocated.
“We want to find out exactly when and how that happened. We want to know if there were population movements – for example, if the depopulation happened from west to east, as many presume, and at what moment, and where did they find shelter,” Dr. Gates St-Pierre said in an interview.
He is involved in another initiative also looking at this depopulation. He pointed to the discovery of Iroquoian artifacts, such as ceramics, at Leamy Lake, across the river from Ottawa, in Anishinaabe territory.
The pottery could have come from trade but it’s also possible that St. Lawrence Iroquoians relocated to the Ottawa Valley and over time joined the Anishinaabe, he said.
This research will be done in collaboration with the local Anishinaabe community of Kitigan Zibi and excavations will be conducted jointly with Indigenous archeologists.
In his federal grant application, Dr. Gates St-Pierre wrote that “this is a project focused on researching social contacts in the past as much as on making contacts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the present.”
These projects could provide a coda to the poignant words recorded in written accounts left by the French Jesuits.
During the 1642 establishment of Ville-Marie, the future city of Montreal, co-founder Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve climbed to the top of Mount Royal. He was accompanied by two Onontchataronons, members of an Ottawa valley Anishinaabe nation that scholars believe might be linked to the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, Dr. Gates St-Pierre said.
“They told Maisonneuve that, once upon a time, their ancestors cultivated the land there.”