This is the first detailed analysis of a completely excavated northern Iroquoian community, a sixteenth-century ancestral Wendat village on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The site resulted from the coalescence of multiple small villages into one well-planned and well-integrated community. Birch and Williamson frame the development of this community in the context of a historical sequence of site relocations. The social processes that led to its formation, the political and economic lives of its inhabitants, and their relationships to other populations in northeastern North America are explored using multiple scales of analysis. This book is key for those interested in the history and archaeology of eastern North America, the social, political, and economic organization of Iroquoian societies, the archaeology of communities, and processes of settlement aggregation.
The Mantle Site received a commendatory endorsement from the well-respected reviewer Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries (the premier source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and internet resources of interest to those in higher education). See a preview of the review on The Mantle Site’s Amazon page.
The book is available from Altmira Press, Amazon or Chapters/Indigo.