[LINK] "Scrap of European iron unearths 500-year-old Canadian mystery"

[rfmcdonald]

Randy Boswell's Postmedia News article examining the excavation of a very early European trade good in an early 16th century Huron settlement (the Mantle Site in the Greater Toronto Area bedroom community of Whitchurch-Stouffville, north of Toronto proper), highlights the First Nations past of Toronto.

A Canadian archeologist who excavated the remains of a 500-year-old First Nations settlement near Toronto has revealed a stunning discovery: a carefully buried, European-made metal object that somehow reached the 16th-century Huron village nearly 100 years before the documented arrival of any white man in the Lake Ontario region.

The unearthing of what appears to be part of a wrought-iron axe head at the so-called "Mantle" archeological site in present-day Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ont. — a fast-growing suburb about 40 kilometres east of Toronto — is showcased in a new documentary film, titled Curse of the Axe, to be screened for the first time Monday at the Royal Ontario Museum and broadcast nationwide July 9 on History Television.

The documentary details the quest by Toronto-based archeologist Ron Williamson and his colleagues to identify the composition and origin of the metal artifact and determine how it might have wound up so far inland — at least 1,500 kilometres west of any 16th-century European whaling or fishing station on the Atlantic coast — at such an early time in Canadian history.

The Mantle site is described by Williamson as "the most complex village ever in northeastern North America." Researchers have recovered tens of thousands of artifacts indicating it was a sprawling settlement with dozens of longhouses and a fort-like palisade, all surrounded by cornfields used to feed as many as 2,000 Huron inhabitants for several decades beginning around 1500 A.D.

Historians believe the first contact between Europeans and the Huron tribes of the Great Lakes didn't occur until around 1615, when French explorer Etienne Brule — an important scout and liaison with First Nations for Quebec City founder Samuel de Champlain — reached Lake Ontario.

The film chronicles the researchers' high-tech testing of the metal object, which confirms it came from Europe. A telltale mark on the iron artifact points even more precisely to the Basque Country of modern-day Spain as its place of origin — a logical link, given the well-documented presence of Basque whaling operations at Red Bay, Labrador, in the early 1500s.

Williamson's team hypothesizes that the iron piece might have been traded by Basque whalers to members of a native group on the East Coast of Canada, who subsequently traded the metal westward until it was acquired by the Hurons of the Mantle village.