Abstract

After the American Revolution, the British Government granted a large tract of land along the Grand River in Southwestern Ontario to members of the Six Nations Iroquois who were loyal to the British Crown and had chosen to leave New York State. About 1,800 people, led by Joseph Brant, settled along the river south of present day Brantford. By the late eighteenth century a chain of Six Nations villages extended down the Grand River, consisting of loose agglomerations of log cabins. In what eventually would be south Brantford was the Upper Mohawk Village, where Joseph Brant, his family, and a number of other Mohawk families lived, adjacent to a frame chapel. Development activities in the early 1980s, situated adjacent to the still standing Mohawk Chapel revealed a number of features related to the nineteenth century Upper Mohawk settlement. Excavations focused on an area represented by two cellar pits with associated features, occupied sequentially by the same family between the beginning of the nineteenth century and 1860s. The archaeological materials recovered from these two occupations, as well as the findings from other areas of the village, document changes to settlement-subsistence and material culture use through this period of massive change in southern Ontario, and also show how changes differed between this highly Christianized Iroquois group and other, more conservative sectors of the Grand River Six Nations community. As well the archaeological data obtained from this site both augment and contradict traditional historical interpretations of Mohawk culture history in the nineteenth century, demonstrating the potential value archaeological investigations have in the area of Late Historic Native studies.