The St. Lawrence Iroquois lived in large, stoutly defended villages and were farmers who grew corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and tobacco. Some of these villages contained as many as forty longhouses which could have sheltered close to 2,000 people.
The Algonkians
It would be very convenient if we could refer to the northern Algonkian-speakers who occupied Ontario as Algonkins, Ojibwa and Cree. These names, however, refer to groups of small, independent bands of hunters who were loosely related through marriage and clan affiliation and, more generally, through language and way of life. Tribal names equivalent to those used in describing the Iroquoian-speaking people of Southern Ontario cannot be applied to the Algonkian-speakers of Northern Ontario. Despite this difficulty there is sufficient archaeological evidence to propose three major areas of Algonkian development in Northern Ontario.
The Eastern Area
The Eastern area of Algonkian cultural development extends northward to Lake Abitibi, westward to the northeast shore of Lake Superior, and on the east is adjacent to the Huron, Petun, and the St. Lawrence Iroquois.
Pottery and pipe styles in this area are similar or identical to those of the Huron and Petun. Indeed, portions of the eastern Algonkians appear to have shared the same ceramic tradition with their Iroquoian neighbours from as early as A.D. 800. In addition to the Iroquoian style pottery, however, these people also made pottery in the same styles as related people in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. The mixture of pottery styles appears to be characteristic of the northern Algonkians. Within the small bands there would have been a limited number of marriageable women. As a result men would frequently obtain their wives from other areas. Imagine, for example, that there were three brothers living on a site near Manitoulin Island who required wives at the same time but that there were no marriageable women in their small, local community. If one man obtained a wife from Lake Nipissing, the second a wife from northern Wisconsin, and the remaining brother a spouse from the west end of Lake Superior, their three Algonkian-speaking wives would eventually be sitting together at the same site making completely different kinds of pottery vessels.
Despite the similarities between eastern Algonkian and Huron-Petun pottery, the stone and bone tools of these two peoples are distinctively different as were a number of other cultural traits.
Certain of the eastern Algonkians adopted corn agriculture from their Iroquoian-speaking neighbours but only in a half-hearted fashion. The crop was planted in the spring, abandoned during the summer and the remnant, which survived the ravages of raccoons, birds and insects, was harvested in the fall.
The Western Area
The Western area of Algonkian cultural development involved a region running from Lake Superior to the height of land separating the Hudson Bay drainage from the Great Lakes drainage, to southern Manitoba and the northern edge of Minnesota.
The dominant pottery style in this region developed out of the preceding Laurel pottery of the Initial Woodland period. The western area Algonkians also retained the Laurel cultural practice of constructing earth burial mounds. As was the case with the Laurel mounds, these later mounds are restricted to a narrow band along the Ontario and Minnesota border and extend eastward to the western end of Lake Superior and westward into Manitoba.
The stone tools of the western Algonkians are very similar to those of the eastern Algonkians. The former group, however, had more ready access to the native copper deposits of Lake Superior and, as a result, copper awls, beads, bangles and knives are relatively common. Stone smoking pipes appear as early as A.D. 950 and are shaped in a typical western style that has no relation to the pipe complex of the Iroquoian peoples to the east. In the rare instances where bone survives the acid northern soils, tools such as harpoons, beaver incisor knives, and awls are common and bone refuse consists mainly of fish and big game such as caribou and moose.
As was the case with the eastern Algonkians, a number of western Algonkian sites containing European (French and English) trade goods have been excavated. The historic period is thus ushered in.
The Northern Area
The Northern area of Algonkian cultural development was centred basically in north-central Saskatchewan and Manitoba, but also extended into adjacent Northern Ontario. Very little is yet known of the northern Algonkians of Ontario. What little information is available suggests that these people are fundamentally the same as the western Algonkians except for their development of a distinctive kind of pottery.
If one ignored the pottery and considered only the stone and bone tools, the Eastern, Western, and Northern Algonkian areas would be regarded as part of a large, general archaeological complex. This impression is supported by the occurrence in the same area of rock paintings and boulder constructions, both of which probably served some religious function. The different pottery traditions have, however, been useful in dividing the enormous area of Northern Ontario into the three geographic regions outlined above. The cultural and linguistic similarities seen among the present Algonkians of Northern Ontario are strongly reflected in their prehistory.
With the coming of Europeans and written records, the story of the native peoples of Ontario passes from prehistory to history. It should be pointed out, however, that more than ninety-seven percent of the time that man has occupied this province belongs to the dim and still largely unwritten pages of prehistory.
