summarizing typologies of sixteenth-century Basque pottery and European glass beads are another. Apart from these significant material culture contributions, this volume’s focus remains firmly on the cultural interactions between the… Click to show full abstract
summarizing typologies of sixteenth-century Basque pottery and European glass beads are another. Apart from these significant material culture contributions, this volume’s focus remains firmly on the cultural interactions between the region’s many peoples, as inferred from the presence of artifacts of nonlocal origin. Most of the authors characterize this evident exchange of goods as “trade,” although most also acknowledge how little they know about the social mechanisms that transferred these goods from person to person throughout the region. Loewen and Chapdelaine cite earlier realizations by Bruce Trigger and Marcel Moussette that apparently uneven regional distributions of European artifacts in sixteenth-century Native contexts probably indicate differing intensities of interaction between communities and societies (p. 2). Since different parts of the St. Lawrence watershed have received different levels of archaeological attention, this volume’s authors set out to survey all available sixteenth-century data and to evaluate whether localized absence of evidence for interaction is merely apparent or real. By putting that notion to the test, they assembled more information on sixteenthcentury interactions than anticipated, even from areas previously thought devoid of evidence. Nearly every chapter in this volume documents interaction routes that diverged from the main St. Lawrence corridor— for instance, up the Labrador coast through the Strait of Belle Isle; east to the French, Mi’kmaq, and Abenaki in Acadia; and up the Saguenay River at Tadoussac to Lac St.-Jean. The result is an intricate social network ripe for future analysis.
               
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