Highlights
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- Northern Iroquoian settlements were frequently relocated.
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- Landscapes and communities are mutually constitutive.
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- Abandoned village sites and ossuary features shaped perceptions of the landscape.
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- Ancestral landscapes became politically-defined territories.
Abstract
After the transition to settled village life ca. AD 1300, the Northern Iroquoian peoples of northeastern North America relocated their settlements every few decades or less. Frequent village location meant that, after less than 100 years, the landscape they inhabited would have contained more abandoned than occupied village sites. We draw upon ancestral Wendat site relocation sequences on the north shore of Lake Ontario, Ontario, Canada to explore factors influencing village relocation and how the continued abandonment of village sites created ancestral landscapes that included sites of pilgrimage, resource extraction, and ceremony. As communities of the dead, abandoned villages and associated ossuaries were part of a larger set of spiritual responsibilities to meaningful places in the landscape. As ancestral sites, these places were part of ongoing processes of emplacement through which Wendat communities laid claim to politically-defined territories.
Graphical abstract
Keywords
- Iroquoian;
- Settlement patterns;
- Mortuary practices;
- Landscape
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