Archeological editorial standards board needed

Otherwise old mistakes continue to shape our thinking

Petun tobacco farming

While watching the U.S. Open this weekend, I read a PDF during the commercials. It was about one of my favorite subjects, the ancient people of the Great Lakes area. Published in the ‘Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology in 2023, it was entitled “Early Palisaded Villages in Southwestern Ontario” by William Fox and Andrew M. Stewart.

In it there is one glaring error which doesn’t nullify the veracity of the rest of the study, but it taints it. It shouldn’t. And it wouldn’t if there was some editorial board whose job it would be to make sure things like that don’t happen again.

What happened was the authors cite a report from the ‘90s that was refuted shortly afterwards. I’ve written about this before because I found it happening before. Because this report was published just two years ago, the confusion obviously continues. What a shame. And it doesn’t need to be.

If Fox and Stewart would have submitted their work to an archaeological editorial integrity board, their paper would be stronger and we who read it would be more confident. And in today’s electronic world, it wouldn’t be hard to set up such a board. Trouble is, there's no place for it to emerge from. There needs to be a layer of editorial finesse between any pre-published archaeological or anthological report and its readers. Think of the things that would come to light. Old pathways that lead to darkness and conflict would be swept away. Experts would share a group think and be able to build on it. The editors themselves would become clearing houses of really precise data. They would be in a position to put the results of these many reports in editorial order. This would create a synthesis of various single reports, a synthesis which could be kept up to date daily. My mind staggers at the possibilities of such syntheses.

What I’m talking about specifically is the Murphy/Ferris controversy. In their conclusion Fox and Stewart wrote this: “Evidence from twelfth-century camps on the western Norfolk sand plain suggests interaction with Central Algonquian Younge phase populations occupying the Thames River drainage to the west (Murphy and Ferris 1990 242-244).”

The thing. Is this “Younge phase” is not Central Algonquin; it is Michigan/Southwest Ontario Iroquoian. The Younge phase is second phase of the Younge Tradition which scholars from Emerson Greenman to James Fitting to David Stothers have ascertained were an Iroquoian-speaking culture that occupied both sides of Le Détroit in Michigan and Ontario.

Fox and Stewart’s job in presenting this paper is not to confirm or deny the presence of this Young phase. It is to shed some light on those palisaded villages. They show when the palisaded villages appear and when they disappear. They suggest the stocked walls were for protection but don’t say from whom. In this they appear unconscious of some of Algonquin populations ebbs and flows around this time.

After conflating Younge with Central Algonquin, they surmise, “Dramatic evidence from the Lafarge burial in the Thames River drainage suggests that this interethnic interaction may not always have been peaceful.” They found the body of a “murdered and scalped young man” and determined the spearheads and arrowheads used to kill him were from emerging Northern Iroquoian cultures, but they have no clue to the victim’s cultural identity. They do suggest he was Central Algonquin, but wrongly conflate the Younge phase with Central Algonquin. It is more likely the victim was Mascouten but that would date to around 1640. If the burial is around 1400 it could possibly be of an Ojibway youth. The Great Ojibway Migration came through southern Ontario in the 14th century, according to an Ojibway author.

Here’s Fox and Stewart's statement: “murdered and scalped young male” was found brutalized near the Calvert village (Spence and Wilson 2015). “The authors note that “the forms and materials of the points suggest that the assailants were Princess Point people or people from the early Glen Meyer period, but the identity of the victim is unknown….Based on subsequent historically documented hostilities, this aggressive event may have been triggered by Iroquoian encroachment on Central Algonquian hunting territories, as suggested by Spence and Wilson (2015:133).”

This seems like it needs ironing out. The facts seem to be a little wrinkled. First of all, there is evidence of the emergence of Iroquoian culture in Le Détroit dating back to around 700 AD at the Riviere au Vase site in New Baltimore, Michigan and even earlier at the Gibraltar site further down-river. In fact, at the primary level of the Gibraltar site there is clear evidence of Hopewell culture, leading me to believe Iroquoian emerged in part from the high culture of the Hopewell.

In other words, the territory of southeastern Michigan and southwestern Ontario were occupied with Iroquoian-speaking people, so they didn’t encroach on Central Algonquin hunting territory. David Stothers thought it was the other way around. The way he sees it is, as populations began to expand in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries due to the successful introduction of maize, beans and squash, the Central Algonquin-speaking tribes which he calls the Wolf Phase of the Sandusky Tradition, pushed out the people of the Springwells Phase of the Younge Tradition, aka Michigan Huron. He says they fled or migrated to northern Michigan, into southwestern Ontario, ergo the expansion of those villages Fox and Stewart report on, further into eastern Canada and down to central Indiana, where they merged with the Central Algonquin people there to form the last phase of the Sandusky Tradition.

(Ain’t I smart to do all that off the top of my head?)

The murdered and scalped youth could have been Mascouten who were at war with the Neutrals or he could have been Ojibway. Along with other Ontario and Michigan archaeologists, Fox and Stewart do not seem to be aware of the Ojibway migration which reached the Great Lakes around 1400 AD, according to Ojibway elder Edward Benton-Banai.

There is archaeological evidence of a period of conflict which runs through southern Ontario around this time. It seems likely that this violence which dissipated by the late 14th century, was the result of this mass migration moving through. Benton-Banai talks about some conflict which they encountered along the way, but says it was not with all of the Iroquoian peoples they met.

This would account for the fact Fox and Stewart uncovered that the early 14th century southwestern Ontario Iroquoian villages were heavily palisaded, but by the late 14th century, as in Tillsonburg and elsewhere, they were not.

With all of these questions and possibilities, the need for an editorial board of archaeological findings is ever more apparent.