User:TangoFett/sandbox

Pre-contact

Reconstructing the pre-contact history of Algonquian cultures has involved combining data from linguistic, archaeological, and Indigenous oral sources. Exactly when and where the Proto-Algonquian (PA) language evolved from its much older Algic family (which has non-Algonquian examples, Wiyot and Yurok, in California) has been the subject of decades of debate; however, currently discussed estimates place the PA urheimat within the northern Great Lakes region between 4,000 - 2,500 years ago.^[6][7][8] From there, migrations spread from all directions at different time periods. Linguist Ives Goddard considered the Blackfoot language, spoken in Alberta and Montana, to have diverged the earliest from the rest of the Algonquian stock, followed by the Arapaho, Cree, Cheyenne, Menominee, the "Core Central" branch, and finally the Eastern Algonquian branch.^[9]

Algonquianists studying the Proto-Algonquian language often refer to the reconstructed lexicon published by Frank Siebert in 1975,^[10] the first substantial such reconstruction that built upon Leonard Bloomfield's initial works and methods.^[11] By applying Bloomfield's principles for reconstructing PA, Siebert analyzed likely cognates for plants and animals using a Wörter und Sachen approach. These indicated a PA homeland nested more or less firmly within the Ontario Peninsula, existing anywhere between 1200 to 900 BCE.^[12] Additionally, there are an elaborate diversity of terms associated with water, watercraft, fishing, and other aquatic resources (including harbor seals), strongly indicative of lifestyles based heavily around the Great Lakes and surrounding lakes and rivers.^[13] The original PA social structure may, similar to the Cree, have consisted of small groups of families that seasonally joined with relatives in large camps. The need for cooperation and labor beyond the local village level in order to maximize the seasonal bounty of fish — and to continually maintain those distant connections — is also likely to have encouraged the complex system of clans, moieties, and sodalities seen in many Algonquian cultures (for example, the Anishinaabe system).^[14] Such networking systems would have allowed Proto-Algonquian groups to build alliances, trade, and maintain connections across vast distances while also providing many avenues to integrate outsiders, just as did historic Algonquian societies.^[15] Siebert's reconstructed PA also contains terms for "gourd/squash" and "calabash", as well as terms for sowing seeds; it is likely that Proto-Algonquians already had access to some basic crops of the ancient Eastern Agricultural Complex (especially gourds, useful for containers and net floats), but did not heavily rely on them for their diet.^[16][17][18]

One reconstructed PA word important to understanding the migration history is for "bow".^[a] Traditionally, the introduction of the bow and arrow from the Subarctic is thought to have taken place near the beginning of the Late Woodland (500 - 1000 CE), suggested by the apparent rapid replacement of larger notched/stemmed points with small, thinner triangular types and the end of complex cultural groups such as the Hopewell thought to represent the upheaval brought by this new weapon.^[20][21] Although "arrowhead" points overwhelmingly dominate the context after this date, researchers have increasingly suggested that the bow may have been used in the upper Northeast as far back as the Late Archaic, coexisting with the atlatl.^[b] This reconciles the existence of the PA term with what else has been determined about their homeland and timeframe, and it is further suggested that Algonquian-speaking peoples, through their expansions, were the primary agents spreading and popularizing the bow into the rest of North America.^[17][25][26]

Researchers Alvin H. Luckenbach, Wayne E. Clark, and Richard S. Levy posit some of the earliest dates in recent literature for Proto-Algonquian evolution and expansion. Based on their own interpretation of Siebert's data for the PA urheimat, projected lifestyles and archaeological correlations, the work of other researchers linking the continuity of early archaeological complexes, as well as the presence of PA words for copper, earthworks/entrenchement, shell beads, they propose Proto-Algonquian ancestors had affinities with the Late Archaic Glacial Kame and Red Ocher complexes of the eastern Great Lakes region (and possibly as far back as the Old Copper complex). In turn, they believe these complexes led to the development of the Meadowood Interaction Sphere.^[27][28] Dating from roughly 3,000 to 2,500 years ago, Meadowood is characterized by more elaborate mortuary practices, the widespread distribution of Onondaga chert from Michigan to Nova Scotia and a set of shared material styles. Meadowood groups are also thought to have served as middlemen traders between groups from the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard.^[23] Luckenbach et al. identify the Meadowood sphere with the initial expansion of Proto-Algonquian groups starting around 1200 BCE near the Finger Lakes, who stayed connected to their homeland and with related groups along family, clan and sodal lines. Aided by the ease of canoe routes, they exchanged new resources among themselves and interred their dead in the same burial grounds under the same mortuary practices.^[28][29] They also identify the Middlesex complex of New York, associated with the Adena culture of the Ohio valley,^[30] as a subset of Meadowood and the Adena culture itself as associated with Proto-Central Algonquians; thus, the continued Adena influence on Middlesex/Meadowood is explained as continued kinship interactions between Central and Eastern Algonquians.^[31][28]

Another prominent Algonquianist, Stuart J. Fiedel, has heavily critiqued the model of Luckenbach et al. He noted that their glottochronological divergence estimates were placed nearly a thousand years after the latest known Adena presence, and found their connection of the Adena culture with PA to be highly improbable given Siebert's placement of the urheimat in Ontario (of which he and they are in agreement). Fiedel's methodology, using techniques updated for its time, likewise suggested dates significantly later than Adena and Meadowood. Keeping the PAs in southern Ontario, he noted that the earliest indications of pottery as well as the moment that earthworks became popular in the region was around 600 - 500 BCE, and smoking pipes occurring at around 800 BCE; this coincided with his estimates that placed the evolution of PA no earlier than the Early Woodland period (1000 - 200 BCE) and probably well within it. Fiedel emphasized that although evidence suggests an ancient (though not predominant) history of the bow in the Northeast (thus, the PAs would have been familiar with it), the drastic lithic changes of the Late Woodland still strongly represent the incipient diffusion of the bow via waves of migrants. He also cited two separate oral histories by the Nanticoke and Virginia Algonquians, both of which dated their arrival from the north into the Chesapeake region at around 1300 CE, as an indication that the waves of Algonquian migrations occurred relatively late.^[7]

Fiedel's migration model, based on the above familiarities, identifies the first expansions of Proto-Algonquians with the spread of the Point Peninsula complex, whose earliest manifestations (and, from its Saugeen variant, the oldest known pottery north of the Great Lakes)^[7] trace back to the Ontario Peninsula in 600 BCE and eventually spread well eastward. A population hiatus in the Northeast starting around 700 BCE may have given the proto-Algonquian migrants the opportunity to expand with little resistance; if they had the bow at this time, Fiedel believed it may have lent them an advantage.^[7] Fiedel joined and cited earlier archaeologists in connecting the PAs to Point Peninsula; one, William A. Ritchie, noted that key diagnostics of Point Peninsula ceramics could be found from New Brunswick, across New England (present by 200 BCE), central New York (by 200 CE) to potentially as far west as Manitoba, noting that sherds from Minnesota and New Hampshire were nearly identical.^[17][32] At the same time that Point Peninsula sites spread into New England, pottery from the Laurel complex (which Ritchie identified as related to Early Point Peninsula) had spread from Quebec to Saskatchewan, and Fiedel considered they may represent ancestors of the Cree.^[17] By focusing on pottery, a female-dominated craft in many Native American societies, Fiedel argues this is likely to represent the migration of ethnic communities themselves and/or the ability of women to communicate their ideas across a shared territory.^[33] After this point, Fiedel saw Algonquian speakers as "fringe participants" of the Hopewell tradition and may have carried on some of these ideas of long-distance trade.^[34] Starting from linguistic data, Fiedel also postulates a second wave of expansion nearly a thousand years later that initiated the divergence of Eastern Algonquian from the Central languages, associated with Delaware's Webb complex with its exotic goods and Jack's Reef points.^[7] Fiedel surmises that the volcanic winter of 536 may have been a strong (though not sole) trigger for southward migrations, or even contributed to the Hopewell decline.^[34] Between 450 - 700 CE material related to the Laurel complex and groups from Michigan, using Jack's Reef points, appear in northern Ohio, including the Intrusive Mound culture which buried their dead within older Hopewell mounds. Fiedel identified these groups as ancestral to the Shawnee of Ohio and related Kickapoo and Sac and Fox of Michigan. By 600 CE the Webb complex proper appears in Delaware, which Fiedel used to mark the migration of Algonquians into the Mid-Atlantic.^[7] Fiedel's model is often used by Mid-Atlantic archaeologists studying Algonquian migrations.^[35]

Iroquoian intrusion

Cree tipi

Colonial period

At the time of European arrival in North America, Algonquian peoples resided in present-day Canada east of the Rocky Mountains, New England, New Jersey, southeastern New York, Delaware, and down the Atlantic Coast to the Upper South, and around the Great Lakes in present-day Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. At the time of European contact, the hegemonic Iroquois Confederacy, based in present-day New York and Pennsylvania, was regularly at war with their Algonquian neighbors.^{[citation needed]}

New England area

Colonists in the Massachusetts Bay area first encountered the Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nipmuc, Pennacook, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Quinnipiac. The Mohegan, Pequot, Pocumtuc, Podunk, Tunxis, and Narragansett were based in southern New England. The Abenaki were located in northern New England: present-day Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont in what became the United States and eastern Quebec in what became Canada. They traded with French colonists who settled along the Atlantic coast and the Saint Lawrence River. The Mahican were located in western New England in the upper Hudson River Valley (around present-day Albany, New York). These groups cultivated crops, hunted, and fished.^[37]

The Algonquians of New England (who spoke Eastern Algonquian), practised a seasonal economy. The basic social unit was the village: a few hundred people related by a clan kinship structure. Villages were temporary and mobile. The people moved to locations of greatest natural food supply, often breaking into smaller units or gathering as the circumstances required. This custom resulted in a certain degree of intertribal mobility, especially in troubled times.^{[citation needed]}

In warm weather, they constructed portable wigwams, a type of hut usually with buckskin doors. In the winter, they erected the more substantial longhouses, in which more than one clan could reside. They cached food supplies in more permanent, semi-subterranean structures.^{[citation needed]}

In the spring, when the fish were spawning, they left the winter camps to build villages at coastal locations and waterfalls. In March, they caught smelt in nets and weirs, moving about in birch bark canoes. In April, they netted alewife, sturgeon and salmon. In May, they caught cod with hook and line in the ocean; and trout, smelt, striped bass and flounder in the estuaries and streams. Putting out to sea, they hunted whales, porpoises, walruses and seals. They gathered scallops, mussels, clams and crabs^[38] and, in southern New Jersey, harvested clams year-round.^[39]

From April through October, natives hunted migratory birds and their eggs: Canada geese, brant, mourning doves and others. In July and August they gathered strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and nuts. In September, they split into small groups and moved up the streams to the forest. There, they hunted beaver, caribou, moose and white-tailed deer.^[40]

In December, when the snows began, the people created larger winter camps in sheltered locations, where they built or reconstructed longhouses. February and March were lean times. The tribes in southern New England and other northern latitudes had to rely on cached food. Northerners developed a practice of going hungry for several days at a time. Historians hypothesize that this practice kept the population down, with some invoking Liebig's law of the minimum.^{[citation needed]}

The southern Algonquians of New England relied predominantly on slash and burn agriculture.^{[41][42][43][44][45][46]} They cleared fields by burning for one or two years of cultivation, after which the village moved to another location. This is the reason the English found the region relatively cleared and ready for planting. By using various kinds of native corn (maize), beans and squash, southern New England natives were able to improve their diet to such a degree that their population increased and they reached a density of 287 people per 100 square miles as opposed to 41 in the north.^[47]

Scholars estimate that, by the year 1600, the indigenous population of New England had reached 70,000–100,000.^[47]

Midwest

The French encountered Algonquian peoples in this area through their trade and limited colonization of New France along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The historic peoples of the Illinois Country were the Shawnee, Illiniwek, Kickapoo, Menominee, Miami, Sauk and Meskwaki. The latter were also known as the Sac and Fox, and later known as the Meskwaki Indians, who lived throughout the present-day Midwest of the United States.^[48]

During the nineteenth century, many Native Americans from east of the Mississippi River were displaced over great distances through the United States passage and enforcement of Indian removal legislation; they forced the people west of the Mississippi River to what they designated as Indian Territory. After the US extinguished Indian land claims, this area was admitted as the state of Oklahoma in the early 20th century.^[48]

Upper west

Ojibwe/Chippewa, Odawa, Potawatomi, and a variety of Cree groups lived in Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Western Ontario, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Canadian Prairies. The Arapaho, Blackfoot and Cheyenne developed as indigenous to the Great Plains.^[49]

List of historic Algonquian-speaking peoples