The Archaeological History of the Wendat to A.D. 1651: An Overview

The foundations for modern scholarship concerning Wendat history and archaeology were laid in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by researchers, such as Andrew Hunter and Arthur Jones, investigating hundreds of sites and ossuaries that had been reported to provincial authorities. The focus of their work and of the work of many of those who followed was the search for places that could be related to villages and missions mentioned in early documentary accounts. Avocational, academic, and government agency archaeologists working in the mid-twentieth century had only these early archaeological studies to inform their investigations of Wendat sites. During the past 30 years, however, a revolution in archaeological data collection has occurred. Some of these data are published and thus accessible to current researchers, but much of it remains unpublished and some of it has not even been reported on. This paper is an overview of most of this work, especially of those sites where substantial excavations have occurred. It is intended to provide a guide for those who wish to use these studies to delve deeper into various aspects of the history of historic-period or ancestral Wendat communities.