Christian Gates St-Pierre

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Anthropology

The dispersal of Iroquoian groups from St. Lawrence River valley during the 15th and 16th centuries A.D. has been a source of archaeological inquiry for decades. Social network analysis presented here indicates that sites from Jefferson County, New York at the head of the St. Lawrence River controlled interactions within regional social signaling n...

Tattoos can be conceptualized as embodied experiences, ideas, and meanings expressed by groups and individuals. In Northeastern North America, many Iroquoian nations from the Contact period were known for practicing body transformations of this sort. Moreover, the archaeological literature abounds with cases of Iroquoian bone objects interpreted as...

In the 1960s, archaeology was a newcomer to Quebec’s cultural francophone scene, and commercial archaeology made its first appearance at the end of the 1970s. Today, in a context of global chronic economic crisis, we intend to examine the effects of provincial and federal ideological and economic trends on the praxis of archaeology in Quebec. These...

Today, practical, functional and symbolic choices inform the selection of raw materials for worked objects. In cases where we can discern the origin of worked bone, tooth, ivory and antler objects in the past, we assume that similar choices are being made. However, morphological species identification of worked objects is often impossible due to th...

This chapter introduces a global perspective on the analysis of faunal and worked bone assemblages through the adoption of an integrative approach. Using a series of Pre-Contact Iroquoian sites from southern Quebec (Canada) as a case study, it illustrates the benefits resulting from a sustained and integrated collaboration between faunal and bone t...

Relatively little is known from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century AD ethnohistorical record about Iroquoian societies in the St Lawrence River Valley compared to the Huron-Wendat in southern Ontario and Haudenosaunee in New York. This is because Iroquoian villagers dispersed from the valley over the course of the sixteenth century. Here we use...

Shark remains are common in coastal archaeological sites in southern Brazil. Here we present an analysis of microwear visible on shark teeth found at the Rio do Meio site in Florianópolis, Brazil. It demonstrates that hafted shark teeth were used to work soft materials such as leather, as well as semihard materials such as wood and bone, whereas ot...

Bone tool studies are at a crossroads. A current path is to go beyond the concatenation of methods or concepts borrowed from other disciplines and aim instead at a truly integrated approach that is more in line with the objectives of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The papers in this volume follow this direction by adopting variou...

Née en 1948 à Saint-Boniface (Manitoba), Gisèle Piédalue a principalement oeuvré au sein de l'Agence Parcs Canada, avant de devenir archéologue consultante. Né en 1952 à Hamilton (Ontario), William Moss a fait carrière comme archéologue à la Ville de Québec. Propos recueillis par Christian Gates St-Pierre en décembre 2020.

This paper presents the preliminary results of a project initiated by the Mohawk Council of Kahnawa:ke and the Groupe de recherche ArchéoSociale/ArchéoScience (Université de Montréal) to create a database of archaeological sites in Quebec that included Indigenous human remains. This document will be a useful tool for the repatriation/rematriation p...

The Quackenbush site (BdGm-l) is located in what is now Ontario, at the northeastern limit of the area known to have been occupied by the Huron-Wendat pre-dispersal and visited by the Anishinaabeg of the Canadian Shield. Excavations of portions of the site half a century ago uncovered parts of three longhouses and midden deposits. We generated the...

La décolonisation de la science et la réconciliation avec les communautés autochtones mènent les archéologues vers de nouvelles pratiques archéologiques plus collaboratives et respectueuses des enjeux, des considérations et des perspectives autochtones concernées. Malgré les conséquences généralement positives émanant de ce type de projet, des tens...

The study presented in this chapter uses archaeological and ethnohistorical data to discuss the role of black bears ( Ursus americanus ) among Pre-Contact Iroquoian societies from Northeastern North America. This role is proving to be complex and multifaceted, and the analysis of the archaeological and ethnohistorical records provide contradictory...

L'archéologie préhistorique nord-américaine est entraînée dans un processus de décolonisation qui l'oblige à se remettre en question et à redéfinir ses pratiques, de même que ses liens avec les communautés autochtones et leur patrimoine archéologique. N'ayant plus le monopole du discours sur ce patrimoine, les archéologues élaborent de nouvelles ap...

Climatic change that occurred during the Holocene is often recognized as the main factor for explaining fire dynamics, while the influence of human societies is less apparent. In eastern North America, human influence on fire regime before European settlement has been debated, mainly because of a paucity of sites and paleoecological techniques that...

Le site archéologique entourant la maison historique qui abrite le musée Maison Nivard-De Saint-Dizier, à Verdun, témoigne d’une séquence continue d’occupation qui remonte jusqu’à 5000 ans AA. Situé au pied des rapides de Lachine, le site a été fréquenté par toutes les cultures, préhistoriques et historiques, qui ont occupé l’île de Montréal, ce qu...

Bone tools are abundant on Iroquoian sites and are generally analyzed using a typo-functional perspective. This article will serve as a demonstration of a demonstration of the utility of bone tools to study the household and social organization of St. Lawrence Iroquoians through intra- and inter-household spatial analyses.

Les objets en os sont abondants sur les sites iroquoiens et sont généralement analysés dans une perspective typo-fonctionnelle. Cet article montre l'apport des objets en os à l’étude des maisonnées et de l’organisation sociale des Iroquoiens du Saint-Laurent par le biais d’analyses spatiales intra et intermaisonnées.

ABSTRACT: The McDonald, Droulers and Mailhot-Curran sites are part of the St. Anicet cluster of St. Lawrence Iroquoian villages, located in southern Quebec. After many years of archaeological excavations, the three sites have yielded large quantities of faunal remains, including numerous bone tools and manufacturing debris. The assemblages are curr...

At the time of contact with the first Europeans, the St. Lawrence Iroquoians occupied a territory that extended from the mouth of Lake Ontario to the Cap Tourmente area, near Quebec City, with a southward extension to the northern tip of Lake Champlain, as well as seasonal extensions into the estuary and the gulf of St. Lawrence. Decades of archaeo...

The McDonald and Droulers sites, located in Southwestern Quebec, are village settlements of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians dating from the fifteenth century A.D. The collections from these sites contain a group of 11 bone projectile points cynlindrical in shape, hollowed, with a concave base and a beveled distal end. An interregional comparison of Iro...

The St. Lawrence River valley was home to the northernmost case of plant cultivation in Northeastern North America prior to the arrival of the first Europeans. Recent analyses of phytoliths recovered from ancient pottery vessels in this area were dated to the third century BC, possibly representing the oldest evidence for maize cultivation in this...

Analyse technologique et fonctionnelle (tracéologique) des objets en os et des débris de production provenant du site Mailhot-Curran, un village Iroquoien du XVIe siècle à St-Anicet (Québec méridional). This chapter presents a technological and functional (microwear) analysis of the bone tools and manufacturing debris from the Mailhot-Curran site,...

T he development of maize (Zea mays spp. mays) horticulture has received increasing attention in Northeastern North America, especially during the last two decades. Formerly believed to have been introduced at around A.D. 1000, at the onset of the Late Woodland period (A.D. 1000 to 1550), it is now well documented that maize was introduced in this...

Iroquoian populations of North America are known for having developed a subsistence pattern that was largely based on the cultivation of maize, squash, and beans. Hunting and fishing are traditionnally interpreted as representing secondary subsistence activities in this pattern. However, the recent zooarchaeological analysis of a cluster of sites l...

The St. Lawrence Iroquoians, a sub-group of the prehistoric Iroquoian populations of Eastern North America, were talented and prolific producers of bone tools of all kinds. Paradoxically, little is known about the ancient technologies that were used to make those objects, and the function of many is still unknown or debated. A research project was...

Hornfels is a lithic material fre-quently discovered on prehistoric sites in southern Quebec. It is commonly associated with Terminal Archaic (or "post-laurentian" Archaic [4500–3000 B.P.]) occupations, but this study demonstrates that such an associa-tion can be misleading. The results of the physical and chemical analyses presented here also indi...

The northeastern expansion of the Hopewell manifestation barely reached southern Quebec, and the coeval Middle Woodland is characterized as the pseudo-scallop shell ceramic horizon. While the Late Woodland concept is applied elsewhere to cover regional culture histories, the term Late Middle Woodland is used in our research area, mostly because the...

This newspaper article explains the social relevance of archaeology to our contemporary society.

The Iroquoian populations living in Northeastern North America before and after contact with the first Europeans produced large quantities of well preserved bone tools in archaeological sites. This article presents a detailed description of the various functional categories of bone tools typically found in prehistoric Iroquoian bone tool assemblage...

This article presents a critical review of the most significant contributions to our understanding of the prehistory of Southern Québec during the last ten years of archaeological research. General comments are also presented regarding the strengths, weaknesses, current tendencies and future possibilities of prehistoric archaeology in Québec.

The McCord Museum has a large number of collections of prehistoric artifacts from throughout the province of Quebec and North America. Since most of these collections are the result of chance discoveries made many years ago, they have long been forgotten by most archaeologists. One of the collections, which is from Akwesasne and mainly consists of...

This research note describes three small collections of prehistoric Native American artifacts that were apparently discovered in the Gaspé Peninsula and then stored for many years at the McCors Museum in Montréal. Recent analyses of the collections, which were long-forgotten by most archaeologists, have provided more inisght regarding the post-Pale...

Introductory chapter to the edited volume (Bones as Tools: Current Methods and Interpretations in Worked Bone Studies)

This chapter presents the results of a microwear analysis of St. Lawrence Iroquoian bone awls in order to better understand the function of this ill-defined morphological category of bone tools.

Entre l'an 500 et l'an 1000 de notre ère, des groupes de chasseurs-pêcheurs-cueilleurs amérindiens avaient pris l'habitude de passer la saison chaude sur le site Hector-Trudel de la pointe du Buisson, au sud-ouest de Montréal. Ils y ont abandonné une quantité impres-sionnante d'artefacts, notamment de très nombreux fragments de poterie auxquels l'a...

In the current debate regarding the origins of the Iroquoians in the Northeast, both tenants of and opponents to the in situ hypothesis mostly use arguments applying to Iroquoian populations as a whole. Such an approach is essential if we aim to understand the problem from a global perspective. However, a more particularistic approach focusing on e...

Based on the analysis of faunal assemblages, settlement patterns, and specialized technology from nine components of the Late Woodland period (100-1550 AD), this article explains how seal species and other sea mammals were exploited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians in the estuary of the St. Lawrence river.

This article presents a description and definition of the Melocheville tradition, a late Middle Woodland (A.D. 500-1000) ceramic tradition in southern Quebec. The description is based primarily on an attribute analysis of pottery sherds from two important sites located at Pointe-du-Buisson near Montreal. A comparison of the same attributes with oth...

This paper presents the results of a type and attribute analysis of the ceramic remains from the Kipp Island and Hunter's Home sites in central New York State. These analyses suggest that the Hunter's Home phase, as defined by William Ritchie in the 1960s, is an artificial construct. It should rather be interpreted as the simple intrusion of Owasco...

Pottery analysis of a late Middle Woodland period collection from the Pointe-du-Buisson archaeological complex located in southern Quebec.