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No description available.

The lack of a chronological framework for 16th and 17th century northeastern North America has impeded local and regional cultural reconstructions. Based upon the changing style of 16th and early 17th century European glass beads and the settlement patterning of the Neutral Iroquoians of southern Ontario, a chronology has been created. It provides the means to investigate native and European cultural trends during that era, and within this dissertation three topics are examined--the development of the commercial fur trade and its archaeological manifestations, an archaeological definition of the Neutral Iroquoian confederacy, and changes in European material culture recovered from pre-ca. AD 1650 archaeological contexts throughout the Northeast.

The past is often used by political figures in the present in order to achieve political goals by manipulating a feeling of identity, based upon a shared history, among their followers. The extent to which a political leader may alter narratives of the past to meet his or her own needs is governed by certain constraints and laws of structure, as Appadurai and Sahlins have argued (Appadurai 1981; Sahlins 1985). However, the credibility of a leader is affected by such factors as how well that leader fills the cultural construct of a leader's role and adheres to the community's expectations. At Kahnawake, a Mohawk community near Montreal, I found that the amount of authority granted to individual factional leaders in their interpretation of the Iroquois Confederacy's Great Law of Peace reflected the degree to which each leader behaved as a Confederacy chief or orator should, and also reflected the degree to which the leader obeyed social norms, particularly that of not advocating violence against fellow Mohawks. My findings add to the growing body of anthropological literature on the uses of the past by demonstrating in a specific case study how interpersonal relationships between leaders and a community affect the leaders' credibility and authority over the past.

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This study is an analytical examination of a stylistic anomaly observed among Middleport Iroquoian village sites (dating c. A.D. 1300-1450) located near Crawford Lake in southcentral Ontario, Canada. The anomaly is characterized by differing percentages of two forms of ceramic smoking pipes from closely spaced, contemporaneous village sites. This distinction occurs throughout southern Ontario, but is particularly pronounced in the Crawford Lake area. In order to develop and test a model to explain this anomaly, an approach employing a hierarchy of inference, including formal, spatial, temporal, economic, social, and cultural levels, is proposed. This is applied to an analysis of pottery and smoking pipes from eight Middleport sites. The key elements of the explanation are: (1) the two styles represent two distinct prehistoric communities; (2) these communities competed with each other for limited resources; and (3) they symbolized this competition through differences in pipe styles. This conclusion indicates that both the material culture and social relations among Middleport communities may be more complex than has previously been inferred.

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No description available.