Languages Past and Present: Archaeological Approaches to the Appearance of Northern Iroquoian Speakers in the Lower Great Lakes Region of North America

Abstract

Archaeological accounts of the spread of agriculture tend to favor either (im)migration/demic diffusion or in situ development/stimulus diffusion. Having moved away from the early twentieth-century's community-wide migration model for Iroquoian origins in the Lower Great Lakes region and southern Ontario in particular, orthodox archaeological belief over the past half-century had come to place Northern Iroquoian speakers in the area since at least 2,000 years ago and likely much earlier. In what appear to be modified versions of the older migrationist arguments, contemporary thought within archaeology once more seems to allow that wholesale relocations were responsible for bringing farming into the region. It has been suggested, for example, that Northern Iroquoian speakers entered southern Ontario as recently as the early or middle centuries of the first millennium A.D. In this paper, I recount the routes this debate has taken and show that the appearance of maize (Zea mays) agriculture, alongside a few other materials, has come to be bound up with documenting the arrival of Northern Iroquoian-speaking communities. I conclude by reiterating the cautions advised by a number of researchers for how we read past ethnicity from archaeological materials and the role this plays in contemporary political discourse between First Nations and others.