Published archaeological site reports sadly have become a thing of the past. Academic publishers today are looking for synthetic and theoretical contributions from archaeology, with minimal data presentation. However, archaeologists fundamentally rely on the raw data contained in site reports, which ideally should serve as the lasting archive of our destructive examination of the past. Droulers-Tsiionhiakwatha is not only an exemplary site report, providing literally everything a reader needs to know about the site and its contents, but also a summary of almost 40 years of St. Lawrence Iroquoian archaeology in the Saint-Anicet region, southwest of Montréal, Québec. Claude Chapdelaine and his colleagues and students have done a remarkable job of summarizing their investigation of a circa AD 1500 St. Lawrence Iroquoian village (1.3 ha) in incredible detail, using state-of-the-art methods of analysis.
The book is written in French, and it is Volume 38 of the Paléo-Québec series, published by Recherches amérindiennes au Québec. It is edited by Claude Chapdelaine, one of the most accomplished and respected archaeologists in Canada. Since 1974, most Indigenous archaeological site excavations in Québec have been published but have been overlooked and undervalued by English-speaking Canada and certainly in the United States because of the language barrier. However, Québec archaeologists have made every effort over the last three decades to publish summary articles of their research in English, publishing the thick-description site reports in French. The onus should be on Canadian and American archaeologists to learn sufficient French to read the Québec literature, instead of relying in a colonial fashion on Québec archaeologists to publish everything in English. Latin American Antiquity routinely publishes in Spanish.
Droulers-Tsiionhiakwatha contains 17 chapters, covering the history of archaeological research, the cultural and physical site setting, village and house patterns, hearths, pottery, juvenile pottery, smoking pipes, lithic artifacts, worked bone and antler, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, site dating and culture history, social organization of the community, and a conclusion. Accompanying the book is a well-organized CD-ROM containing a complete digital copy of the book in color and field school reports, additional data and figures, and an extensive catalog that were not included in the published content.
There are several noteworthy findings featured in the book. First, extremely rocky drumlin soils and modern agricultural activity make it exceedingly difficult to identify post molds of longhouse walls at the Droulers-Tsiionhiakwatha site. However, hearths and pit features are visible, and their chemical composition, contents, and distribution were analyzed statistically to convincingly delineate at least seven longhouses in lieu of wall posts (Chapters 3 and 4). Not only have all artifact classes and ecofacts been identified and described, but their spatial distribution was examined in detail to identify differences between houses and midden areas (presented throughout in site plans), a rare form of analysis for Iroquoian sites. Pottery analysis is challenging because of the highly fragmented nature of the sample and difficulty in defining discrete vessel numbers. Nonetheless, comparisons of pottery decoration between houses (using both adult and juvenile vessels) discovered potentially related households at the site, inferred later in the book as two or three resident clans (Chapters 5, 6, and 16). Analyses of other artifact classes (pipes, lithics, worked bone and antler [Chapters 8, 9, and 10]) are presented in detail. Identified lithic sources reflect long-distance trade networks (Chapter 9). Zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical studies revealed a surprising reliance on fishing (perch) and the highest consumption of beans of any Iroquoian site (Chapters 11 and 12). Determination of the site's age is based on Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates (Chapter 13) and dating feldspars in site pottery with infrared-stimulated luminescence (Chapter 14), producing an early sixteenth-century date for the site and resulting in a new regional site chronology (Chapter 15). The book concludes that Droulers-Tsiionhiakwatha housed 500 people circa AD 1490–1510, with a subsistence regime dominated by maize-squash-beans agriculture and fishing, and was the largest village in a local site sequence extending from AD 1300 to 1550, attesting to the long-term occupation of a relatively small territory by one community.
It is important to note that research and interpretation of the Droulers-Tsiionhiakwatha site is based primarily on public archaeology and l'Université de Montréal archaeological field schools and has involved the Mohawks of Akwesasne since 1999. This Indigenous community has been directly involved in creating and managing an interpretive center (https://www.sitedroulers.ca/site-en/) at the site, based heavily on the results of archaeological investigations.
This book is a model for what archaeological site reports should be—a comprehensive archive of site investigation, data analyses and interpretation, and placement of the site within a larger regional culture history. Published archaeological site reports are becoming rarer and rarer, and archaeologists are forced to consult the shelves or databases of government agencies to access the gray literature of site investigations. Droulers-Tsiionhiakwatha is essential reading for anyone working in Iroquoian archaeology and most certainly will be consulted a century from now.
