These two master’s theses represent the first detailed reports on historic Neutral village sites. An analysis of the Walker site, a large ten acre, nonpalisaded Neutral Iroquois town occupied circa 1640 A.D. The site provides a comparative baseline for the study of the Neutral Iroquois and demonstrates trends and relationships extant during the late part of the Neutral sequence. Analysis indicates Neutral Iroquois occupancy of the six acre Hamilton site from circa 1638 to 1650 A.D., but the presence of a high percentage of foreign pottery raises a number of interpretational hypothesis to account for it.

"In these two volumes, which replace the Reader's Guide to Canadian History, experts provide a select and critical guide to historical writing about pre- and post-Confederation Canada, with an emphasis on the most recent scholarship" -- Cover.

The early historic, ca. A.D. 1615, Neutral Iroquoian Christianson village site (AiHa-2) proves to be integral in the development of the historic Neutral sequence and the understanding of fur trade related events in early seventeenth century southern Ontario. The following aspects of the Christianson site are emphasized: an examination of the ecological factors which may have influenced the placement of the village; the morphology of the site, focussing on interior longhouse planning; and, analysis of the artifact assemblage.

A description, analysis and interpretation of the Hood site (AiHa-7), a large Historic Neutral town excavated during the summer of 1977. In addition to offering a glimpse of Historic Neutral life just prior to their dispersal in the mid-seventeenth century, this report provides a basis for comparison and assessment of the unusual assemblage from the nearby and contemporaneous Hamilton site. An attempt is made to explain inter-site variability through documented cultural-historical events and also by an explanation of possible sample biases. This publication also includes the report "The Bogle I and Bogle II Sites: Historic Neutral Hamlets of the Northern Tier."

Ten of the twenty Thule winter houses at the Brooman Point site, located on the southern tip of a peninsula extending from the eastern coast of Bathurst Island, were excavated in 1979 and 1980, and the description and interpretation of these remains forms the basis of this report.

Although scholars have long recognized the mythic status of bears in Indigenous North American societies of the past, this is the first volume to synthesize the vast amount of archaeological and historical research on the topic. Bears charts the special relationship between the American black bear and humans in eastern Native American cultures across thousands of years. These essays draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Contributors explore the ways bears have been treated as something akin to another kind of human—in the words of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, “other than human persons”—in Algonquian, Cherokee, Iroquois, Meskwaki, Creek, and many other Native cultures. Case studies focus on bear imagery in Native art and artifacts; the religious and economic significance of bears and bear products such as meat, fat, oil, and pelts; bears in Native worldviews, kinship systems, and cosmologies; and the use of bears as commodities in transatlantic trade. The case studies in Bears demonstrate that bears were not only a source of food, but were also religious, economic, and political icons within Indigenous cultures. This volume convincingly portrays the black bear as one of the most socially significant species in Native eastern North America. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series