Out of the Ground: Archaeology and the History of 17th-Century Middle America

Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 opens on a “shattered” world. Starting in 1648, Iroquoian peoples launched devastating attacks on the largely Algonquian-speaking peoples between Iroquoia and the Mississippi River. As a result, when French colonists arrived in the region, they became co-creators of a new world consisting of the “shattered pieces” of the Algonquian-speaking nations and the “imperial glue” of the French. The hybrid creation – “the middle ground” – would not exist without, to use White’s evocative metaphor, “Iroquois hammer striking Algonquian glass.”

Yet, in the nearly thirty years since The Middle Ground’s publication, scholars have questioned the devastation and extent of the Iroquois wars on nations in the Great Lakes and the Illinois Country. Through their work in sites across the region, archaeologists have literally uncovered a new history of seventeenth-century Middle America, one in which Iroquois raiders played little part. The discoveries of “Peouarea,” the Illinois village in present-day Missouri visited by Marquette and Jolliet in 1673, and a seventeenth-century Illinois village in what is now Arkansas overturned many conceptions about the Illinois. In connection with earlier excavations in the Illinois River valley, these towns revealed the existence of a mid-seventeenth century Illinois trade network stretching for hundreds of miles from the western Great Lakes to Arkansas. As a result, when Wendat and Ottawa refugees – and French colonists – arrived in the region, they found not a world of chaos and upheaval, but instead one defined by order and well-established patterns of trade and diplomacy. This new archaeological evidence has driven a reevaluation of written sources from the 1600s, and together, these records provide the foundation for reconsiderations, not just of the era of the Iroquois wars, but of the decades of French colonization that followed.