The Calvert Site: An Interpretive Framework for the Early Iroquoian Village

Mima Kapches is head of the Department of Anthropology at the Royal
Ontario Museum.

At the Calvert site, Peter Timmins excavated a multicomponent village.
In this book, the excavation and subsequent analysis are presented in
detail.

Multicomponent sites are those sites that are occupied repeatedly over
a period of time. In other sites, in the Old World for example, multiple
layers of occupation build up over thousands of years as “tells”
that can be excavated layer after layer—something like the layers of a
cake. However, in Ontario, because of the very short time frame, these
occupations occur as one layer. To archeologists they appear as a
complex maze of overlapping cultural features. This complexity can be
seen in the many figures that illustrate the text. Timmins’s challenge
was to identify the chronology of each of the features and associated
structures, and then to determine which related to each occupation. To
accomplish this he employed several lines of evidence: radiocarbon
dates, cross-mends of ceramic vessels, and the stratigraphy within the
features. Having made these chronological determinations, he went on to
examine each of the occupations and to theorize about the cultural
changes between the periods represented.

In this dynamic analysis, artifacts are described and analyzed, and
then features, houses, and village settlement patterns are studied.
Exceptionally thorough, well written, and generously illustrated with
figures and plates, Tim-mins’s book is a landmark publication for
archeologists working in Iroquoia.