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Abstract
This dissertation critically evaluates the timing, scale, and nature of Iroquoian population movements from the St. Lawrence River Valley in northeastern North America into neighboring communities in southern Ontario and central New York between CE 1450 and 1580. Attempts by archaeologists to understand these movements within a cultural historic and processual framework have resulted in the creation of explanatory models that are overly rigid and often fail to encapsulate the dynamic nature of movement in Iroquoian lifeways. Indeed, in these models historical contingencies are typically viewed as inconsequential to the larger environmental or social processes that ‘pushed and pulled’ people between regions. In this dissertation, I use updated radiocarbon chronologies and material culture associated with St. Lawrence Iroquoian traditions to highlight the diverse ways in which St. Lawrence Iroquoians engaged in the act of leaving and arriving. Data derived from fifty-nine ancestral Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee village sites across southern Ontario and Upstate New York are employed to consider the choices made by St. Lawrence Iroquoians regarding how they wished to relocate and in reframing previous models for incorporation (i.e., assimilative vs. associative, captive vs. refugee). My results support the interpretation that although the St. Lawrence Valley was devoid of permanent settlement by CE 1580, these departures differed at the individual, household, and community levels. Such differences speak to a dynamic dispersal in which St. Lawrence Iroquoians were not passive victims, but rather, active participants who adjusted their social relations in order to maintain meaningful connections to the St. Lawrence Valley.