Abstract
Iroquoian villagers living in present-day Jefferson County, New York, at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River and the east shore of Lake Ontario, played important roles in regional interactions during the fifteenth century AD, as brokers linking populations on the north shore of Lake Ontario with populations in eastern New York. This study employs a social network analysis and least cost path analysis to assess the degree to which geographical location may have facilitated the brokerage positions of site clusters within pan-Iroquoian social networks. The results indicate that location was a significant factor in determining brokerage. In the sixteenth century AD, when Jefferson County was abandoned, measurable increases in social distance between other Iroquoian populations obtained. These results add to our understandings of the dynamic social landscape of fifteenth and sixteenth century AD northern Iroquoia, complementing recent analyses elsewhere of the roles played in regional interaction networks by populations located along geopolitical frontiers.
Highlights
When Europeans began arriving in northeastern North America in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries AD, they entered a social landscape that was in the process of dynamic geopolitical transformation
Over the course of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries AD, Iroquoians living on the north shore of Lake Ontario in present-day Ontario moved northward toward the south shore of Georgian Bay, while at the same time coalescing into large villages and towns, forming nations, and eventually the Wendat (Huron) confederacy [1,2,3]
What factors led to the JCI serving as liaison brokers in fifteenth-century AD northern Iroquoia? We suggest that the location of these sites at both a physiographic boundary and a cultural divide between nascent Haudenosaunee and Wendat confederacies is one possible factor
Summary
When Europeans began arriving in northeastern North America in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries AD, they entered a social landscape that was in the process of dynamic geopolitical transformation. In the Finger Lakes region and Mohawk River valley of present-day New York, the formation of larger villages was a trend, but geographical coalescence did not occur as in Ontario. Discrete clusters of towns formed nations that were united as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacy [4].
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