People of the Longhouse

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Authors: W. Michael Gear

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Native American & Aboriginal

BOOK: People of the Longhouse
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To Tim, Maria, Brandon, and Connor O’Neal,
for the sacrifices you made while caring for our mother in her
last difficult years. No one could have been kinder,
or taken better care of her. We know it wasn’t easy.
You’ll always have a special place in our hearts.
W
e couldn’t write the PEOPLE series without the dedication and hard work of our archaeological colleagues, many of whom have spent their lives trying to understand the prehistory of this continent. In writing this book, we relied heavily upon the work of Bruce Trigger, Dean Snow, James Tuck, Elisabeth Tooker, William Ritchie, Christina Rieth, John Hart, Mary Ann Levine, Kenneth Sassaman, Michael Nassaney, and Paul Wallace. We are especially grateful to Dr. David Dye, University of Memphis, for his work on prehistoric war and peace movements in the eastern United States.
In addition, the detailed analysis by Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields with regard to dating the founding of the League was very informative. Their article can be found at
www.wampumchronicles.com/signinthesky.html
; it contains a thorough discussion of the historical record and Iroquoian oral history, and provides an excellent cultural context for dating the famed eclipse.
Lastly, we would like to offer our sincere thanks to Catherine Crumpler, and the Hot Springs County Counseling Center in Thermopolis, Wyoming, for their help in understanding the psychological responses of children undergoing extreme stress. Those lengthy discussions were not wasted, Catherine. Thanks for sharing your expertise.
T
he origins of Northern Iroquoians is a hotly debated and very complex topic among archaeologists, but generally we agree that the period from roughly AD 1000–1300 demonstrates fluid and shifting alliances, expanding trade networks, and changing settlement patterns. One thing is for certain: Early Iroquoian cultures were remarkably adaptable and diverse.
Most archaeologists divide Iroquoian culture into three periods: The Early Iroquoian period from AD 1000–1300, the Middle Iroquoian period from AD 1300–1350, and Late Iroquoian from AD 1350 to European contact. For the purposes of this introduction, the Early Iroquoian period is particularly important. Not because it was the apogee of the culture—it wasn’t—but because something dramatic happened. At around AD 1000, most Iroquoian peoples lived in small fishing villages or farming hamlets, primarily along rivers where they had good fertile soils and easy access to water. Toward the end of this period, they began moving away from watercourses and started building their villages atop easily defensible hilltops. Some were palisaded—for example, the Bates site in Chenango County and the Sackett site near Canandaigua, New York, both of which date to the thirteenth century.
It is also likely that during the Early period Iroquoian societies
changed from being patrilineal and patrilocal—meaning they traced descent through the male, and women came to live with their husband’s family—to being matrilineal and matrilocal, in which they traced descent through the female and after marriage a man moved in with his wife’s family.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the size of Iroquois villages began to grow. Archaeologists call this “population aggregation,” meaning that more and more people were crowding together within the palisaded walls of villages. We see these expanded longhouses at places like the Furnace Brook and Howlett Hill sites in New York, where archaeologists excavated houses that were 210 and 334 feet long. This Middle Iroquoian period also saw the people becoming increasingly dependent upon maize-bean-squash agriculture. As in historic times, men probably cleared the fields, built the houses, and hunted, while women were the farmers. They cultivated the soil, planted, tended the fields, harvested and stored the crops. When women began to account for more and more of the food, their lineages also probably became the dominant social avenue for prestige.
At around AD 1400, the first evidence for individual tribes appears. Differences in pottery styles, burial customs, and types of houses demonstrate divisions between Iroquoian groups. As well, small villages begin to amalgamate with larger ones, forming cohesive social groups, or, we suspect, nations.
AD 1400 is also the time when the Iroquois were building the most impressive longhouses, and many were elaborately fortified. At the Schoff site outside Onondaga, New York, the people constructed a longhouse 400 feet long, 22 feet wide, and nearly as tall. The palisaded settlement may have housed 1,500 to 2,000 people, consisting of many different clans.
As those of you who’ve read our previous books know, often this type of aggregation is a telltale sign for archaeologists of interpersonal violence. Simply put, people crowd together for defensive purposes. This is also when cannibalism first appears in the Iroquoian archaeological record in the form of cut and cooked human bones.
People of the Longhouse
takes place at this critical moment in time.
Why did warfare break out? The fact that the climate had grown cooler and drier certainly contributed to the violence. We know that droughts were more frequent, growing seasons shorter, and food shortages probably more common. As well, larger villages deplete resources
at a faster rate. Game populations, nut forests, firewood, and fertile soils would all have played out more quickly, which means they must have had to move their villages more often. Moving may have brought them into conflict with neighbors who needed the food resources just as desperately.
The warfare, we know, was violent.
At the Alhart site in the Oak Orchard Creek drainage in western New York, archaeologists found evidence of burned longhouses and food, and the dismembered remains of seventeen people—most of them male. Historically, it was common practice for women and children to either be killed on site, or taken captive and marched away while the male warriors were tortured and killed. At this site, the fragments of a child’s skull were found in one storage pit, and the skull of a woman in another storage pit. As well, fifteen male skulls were found in a storage pit on top of charred corn, and were probably placed there as severed heads, in the flesh. Some of them were burned. Two had suffered blows to the front of the head.
At the Draper site northeast of Toronto, fourteen burials date to this period. One burial, an old man, was missing both arms and his shoulder blades. A chert arrow point was embedded in his right hip bone (the femoral neck). There was also evidence that he had been speared in the chest, and scalped. As well, he had sustained a severe blow to the left side of his head, and showed cut marks from having been dismembered. Dismembering the enemy was historically a method of stopping the soul from taking revenge upon its killers; dismemberment apparently immobilized the angry spirit of the dead.
The Van Oordt site, a late fourteenth- to early fifteenth-century site near Kitchener, Ontario, revealed thirteen burials. One had fragments of three arrow points embedded in his bones. He also showed signs of numerous puncture wounds; which means he was stabbed several times. Then both of his arms were severed, and he was beheaded.
At the Cameron site near Lima, New York, a young male burial was discovered. He’d been burned, and showed signs of having been stabbed and scalped. Afterward, his skull was broken open, probably to extract the brain. The interesting thing here is that this young man was buried in the village cemetery, not in a refuse midden. This may mean that his body was found by his relatives and brought home for proper burial.
As well, artifacts made from human bone are plentiful on Northern Iroquoian sites that date from the late fourteenth through the
early sixteenth centuries. For example, two skulls were found at the Parsons site in Toronto. The Parsons site was an elaborately palisaded fifteenth-century village. The two skulls, one male and one female, were found in a trash pit inside the inner palisade. Many other human bone artifacts are found in similar “refuse” situations. Human skull pendants or rattles are found across Ontario and New York at the Moatfield, Winking Bull, Uren, Pound, Crawford Lake, Jarrett-Lahmer, Draper, Keffer, Lawson, Campbell, Clearview, Parsons, Beeton, Roebuck, Lite, Salem, and Glenbrook sites. Often the skulls, or skull fragments, have cut marks made by stone tools that are suggestive of scalping. (As you already know from earlier paragraphs, scalping was not a French custom brought to the New World and adopted by the tribes; it existed long before Europeans arrived.) Such skulls were found at the Draper, Keffer, and Lawson sites. Ground and polished fibulas and femurs (leg bones), as well as arm bones (radii) were used for beads and scraping tools. Pierced mandibles (jaws), and finger and toe bones were used as pendants. Ulnae (arm bones) became awls or daggers, and were also strung as beads. Why is it important to archaeologists that all these artifacts were found in trash middens? Because Iroquoian peoples took very good care of their dead relatives. They had lengthy and beautiful burial rituals to make certain their loved ones reached the Land of the Dead. Since these human remains were not properly cared for, it suggests the bones may have come from less valuable members of society, like enemy captives.
Let’s take a few moments to discuss the Iroquoian perspective on captives. By the l400s, as it was in historic times, warfare and raiding for captives was probably the most important method of gaining prestige in Northern Iroquoian societies. When a person died, the spiritual power of the clan was diminished, especially if that person had been a community leader. The places of missing family members literally remained vacant until they could be “replaced,” and their spiritual power—which was embodied in their name—transferred to another person.
Historical records tell us that during the 1600s, the Iroquois dispatched war parties whose sole intent was to bring home captives to replace family members and restore the spiritual strength of the clans. These were called “mourning wars.” Clan matrons usually organized the war parties and ordered their warriors to bring them captives suitable for adoption to assuage their grief and restock the
village. Once the clan had a suitable replacement, the captive underwent the Requickening Ceremony. In this ritual, the dead person’s soul was “raised up” and transferred to the captive, along with his or her name.
This may seem odd to modern readers, but keep the religious context in mind. The Iroquois believed that the souls of those who died violently could not find the Path of Souls in the sky that led to the Land of the Dead. They were excluded from the afterlife and doomed to spend eternity wandering the earth, seeking revenge. However, such souls could find rest if they were transferred—along with their name—to the body of another person. In a very concrete way, the relatives of the dead person were trying to save him.
The souls of men and women killed in battles that were not “raised up” were believed, according to some Seneca traditions, to move into trees. It was these trees with indwelling warrior spirits that the People cut to serve as palisade logs, thereby surrounding the village with Standing Warriors.
Who was fighting? We’re fairly sure the warfare was between neighbors, not marauding armies seeking out distant enemies. Why? Archaeologists do craniometric analyses (measurements of skulls) and compare them with other populations to determine their differences or similarities, which indicate probable genetic relationships. In 1998 Dupras and Pratte conducted a detailed study of skulls from the Parsons site and compared them with four other groups, two local (from the nearby Kleinberg and Uxbridge sites) and two more distant groups (Roebuck and Broughton Hill sites in New York). The similarities in the skulls suggest that they came from local populations and probably represented “trophy” heads. Which means they weren’t fighting invading strangers—they knew each other.
Iroquoian oral history speaks of this as a particularly brutal time, and clearly the archaeological record supports their stories.
But the violence was also the catalyst for one of the most important events in the history of the world. It led to the rise of a legendary hero, a Peacemaker named Dekanawida, who established the Great Law of Peace and founded the League of the Iroquois—a confederacy of five tribes: the Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, and Seneca.
Without the League, the United States would not exist today, nor would our unique understanding of democracy. Concepts like
one-person/one-vote or referendum and recall were not European. They were Iroquoian.
And they would prove to be irresistible to the wave of colonists fleeing oppression in Europe.
In 1775, James Adair wrote a book called
History of the American Indian,
in which he described the Iroquoian system of government by saying, “Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty … [T]here is equality of condition, manners, and privileges … .”
Indeed, the system of government espoused by the League was everything that European monarchies were not. The Iroquois refused to put power in the hands of any single person, lest that power be abused. The League sought to maximize individual freedoms and minimize governmental interference in people’s lives. The League taught that a system of government should preserve individual rights while striving to ensure the public welfare; it should reward initiative, champion tolerance, and establish inalienable human rights. They accepted as fact that men and women were equal and respected the diversity of peoples, their religions, economic and political ideals, their dreams.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “There is an error into which most of the speculators on government have fallen, and which the well-known state of society of our Indians ought, before now, to have corrected. In their hypothesis of the origin of government, they suppose it to have commenced in the patriarchial or monarchial form … (Indian) leaders influence them by their character alone … every man, with them, is perfectly free to follow his own inclinations. But if, in doing this, he violates the rights of another … he is punished by the disesteem of society, or … if serious, he is tomahawked as a serious enemy.”
On the eve of the American Revolution in 1776, English papers began circulating the following account, which was, incidentally, meant to be insulting: “The darling passion of the American is liberty, and that in its fullest extent; nor is it the original natives only to whom this passion is confined; our colonists sent thither seem to have imbibed the same principles.”
Indeed, they had.
Gifted writers like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would openly fan the flames of that “passion” for liberty, and set in motion a chain reaction that has yet to end. That passion would become a sweeping wildfire that would race around the globe and
shape the very heart of what would, centuries later, become known as the Free World.
Dekanawida, quite simply, changed the course of history.
We can only imagine the terrifying forces that might have hardened his resolve … .

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