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- 5 Contact , Neutral Iroquoian Transformation, and the Little Ice Age WILLIAM R. FITZGERALD The explanation of cultural developments among the Neutral Iroquoians of southern Ontario during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been influenced largely by the fact that many of the changes occurred during the initial era of European presence in eastern North America. A reevaluation of the available archaeological, ecological, and climatic record, however, reveals other human and natural agents that contributedboth direcdy and indirecdy to those developments. An underlying tenet of Iroquoian research as far back as the writings of Lewis Henry Morgan (1851: 144-146), and particularly following the work of Richard MacNeish (1952), William Ritchie (1969), andJames Wright (1966), has been that Iroquoian culture was in a state of progressive development that reached its zenith during the seventeenth century. Exposure to Europeans, their material culture, and their diseases has traditionally been considered the dominant, if not the solitary, agent in the abrupt decline of Ontario Iroquoian societies (e.g., Warrick 1984: 131). The profound effect of European contact on Ontario Iroquoian societies cannot be denied, but it has been proposed , upon a reappraisal of the archaeological evidence, that certain aspects of Iroquoian culture in Ontario had attained their cultural apogee by the fifteenth century. By the time European presence became an influential factor, Ontario Iroquoian society was already in the process of redefinition or, more precisely, devolution (Fitzgerald and Jamieson 1985), much like the contemporaneous chiefdoms ofthe southeastern United States (Peebles 1986; Smith 1987). The state of seventeenth-century Neutral Iroquoian society was the result of centuries of adaptations to a complex series of diverse circumstances and forces initially independent of, but later compounded by, the effects of European contact. Among trends observable in the archaeological record between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries are population contraction and dispersal, changing residential and subsistence patterns, a florescence of ritualism, and the adoption of foreigners and exotic material culture. In 1615 Samuel de Champlain noted that the Iroquoianspeaking group concentrated around the western end of Lake Ontario was not involved in the hostilities between the Huron and the Iroquois (Biggar 1922-1936, 3: 99-100). That neutrality led Champlain and subsequent Europeans to refer to this group as the Neutral nation. To the Huron they were the Atiouandaronk(Thwaites 1896-1901, 8: 116). Although the devastating attacks of the Iroquois between 1647 and 1651 effectively extinguished this distinctive culture , the cumulative influences that had earlier molded it and other northern Iroquoian cultures also bore responsibility for their redefinition and ultimate demise. History of Archaeological Research The Neutral Iroquoians have been of interest to archaeologists , historians, and relic hunters since their villages and 37 38 WILLIAM R. FITZGERALD cemeteries were first disturbed by forest-clearing activities in the early nineteenth century (see Lennox and Fitzgerald 1990: 405-408). In 1843 the American ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft was taken to the Dwyer cemetery west of Hamilton, Ontario, and he returned in 1844 and 1845 to collect additional artifacts. The first systematic archaeological investigations of Neutral sites were carried out in the late 1800s and early 1900s by David Boyle from the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto). William Wintemberg from the Victoria Museum (Ottawa) conducted extensive surveys and excavations throughout Neutral territory during the first quarter of the twentieth century and was largely responsible for initiating chronological and classificatory studies for this group. The 1950s and 1960s saw a florescence in Neutral research . Richard MacNeish, Norman Emerson, and James Wright incorporated Neutral data into broader Iroquoian developmental schemes, and Marian White undertook an intensive investigation of the Neutral in the Niagara region of New York and Ontario. During the 1970s and 1980s, substantial numbers of undergraduate and graduate theses from universities in Canada and the United States, as well as independent research projects and salvage excavations, added exponentially to our knowledge of the Neutral. Neutral Distribution Neutral Ontario Iroquoian occupations datable to the fifteenth century are dispersed in a broad band along the north shore of Lake Erie (Fig. 5.1), at the present northern ~ edge of the Carolinian biotic province. During the first half of the sixteenth century a large tract of Neutral territory west of the Grand River was abandoned (T. Lee 1959). The ensuing compaction of Neutral groups around the southwestern corner of Lake Ontario led to the formation of the well-defined tribal territories of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the Neutral allied themselves into a seemingly loose confederacy that persisted until their dispersal (Fitzgerald...

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