From Grey to Print: Early Archaic Components on the East Don River: Archaeological Investigations of the Edgar and Andridge Sites

The Edgar and Andridge sites, situated on headwater streams of the east Don River, were salvage excavated by Archaeological Services Inc. between 2003 and 2006. This article summarizes the subsequent analyses of their settlement data and material culture. An environmental reconstruction was undertaken that included examinations of the geomorphological origin of the area, climate, regional […]

Population movements of the Huron-Wendat viewed through strontium isotope analysis

The Journal of Archaeological Science

Environmental isotopes can provide information about the composition of groups and the movement of people across landscapes. The archaeological record of Huron-Wendat communities in south-central Ontario is one of numerous drainage-based sequences of small villages among which families or larger population segments moved. These villages amalgamated in the early to mid-sixteenth century into fewer, larger […]

Industrial Malting Tiles Found on Toronto Hospital Site

In July 2018, ASI undertook a Stage 4 salvage excavation of lands that were once part of the original Hospital Reserve in the Town of York, now Toronto. The hospital was an important public institution during the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1834, and most particularly the typhus epidemic of 1847. The July 2018 work also […]

Urban rats have less variable, higher protein diets

Over the past 1000 years, rats (Rattus spp.) have become one of the most successful and prolific pests in human society. Despite their cosmopolitan distribution across six continents and ubiquity throughout the world’s cities, rat urban ecology remains poorly understood. We investigate the role of human foods in brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) diets in urban […]

An Early Woodland Domesticated Chenopod (Chenopodium Berlandieri Subsp. Jonesianum) Cache From the Tutela Heights Site, Ontario, Canada

A cache of charred, domesticated chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri subsp. jonesianum) seeds is reported from the Early Woodland (930–915 cal BC) Tutela Heights site (AgHb-446) in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. This is the northernmost report of the crop, approximately 800 km northeast of Kentucky where the previous northernmost occurrences contemporary with Tutela Heights are reported. The Tutela […]

Initial Northern Iroquoian Coalescence

In this chapter, we employ the rich corpus of archaeological settlement data available for southern Ontario and New York State to examine the processes associated with village formation. This included the establishment of maize-based agricultural economies, the emergence of village-communities and the long-house-based residential pattern, and the development of social institutions that served to integrate […]

Steatite characterization using X-ray fluorescence and insights into Northern Iroquoian interregional interaction

The research presented here evaluates the applicability of energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) for characterizing steatite. We present compositional data from an assemblage of 100 steatite beads and pipes deriving from 11 Northern Iroquoian sites in southern Ontario and New York State. Percentages of major elemental constituents and principal components analysis define two compositional groups and various […]