Laurel complex

The Laurel complex, also called the Laurel tradition, is a Middle Woodland archaeological culture in the northern Great Lakes region of North America. Its sites stretch from northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota across north-western Ontario into Manitoba, with traces as far as southern Quebec and east-central Saskatchewan. They were the first people to use pottery in Ontario north of the Trent–Severn Waterway, and they built some of the largest burial mounds in Canada.

The complex takes its name from Laurel, a former settlement in northern Minnesota, and was first defined by the archaeologist Lloyd Wilford in 1941. It is recognised above all by its pottery, known as Laurel ware: fairly thick, grit-tempered jars with cone-shaped bases and straight rims, decorated near the rim with stamped, incised, toothed or punched designs.

Its dating is still debated. In the Rainy River area on the Minnesota–Ontario border, radiocarbon dates suggest a span of roughly 50 BCE to 1000 CE, while Laurel pottery may have lasted into the thirteenth century in parts of south-central Canada. Minnesota archaeologists divide the local sequence into three phases, Pike Bay, McKinstry and Smith, distinguished by shifting proportions of pottery types. Like several other cultures of the region, Laurel appears in the record suddenly, without clear transitional forms.

Laurel people lived by hunting, fishing and gathering, following the seasons across boreal forest, mixed woodland and, in the west, open prairie. Sturgeon, pike and suckers were taken in spring and summer, bison were hunted on the north-western prairies, and moose, beaver and other game sustained small family groups in winter. Wild rice grains have been found at one site, but how important rice was remains uncertain, and there is no evidence of farming. Many sites lie on lakeshores and islands, often beside rapids where fish gathered to spawn. Excavations in Ontario have uncovered oval houses with inner hearths, perhaps large enough for about ten people.

Their toolkit included stone points, scrapers and knives, bone and antler harpoons, ornaments of teeth and bone, and small awls, beads and fishhooks of cold-hammered copper.

Burial mounds are the most striking Laurel remains. They cluster along the Rainy River and on Drummond Island in Michigan, and some are very large. The Grand Mound on the Minnesota bank and the mounds at Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung on the Ontario side, now a National Historic Site of Canada, are the best known. Many mounds grew over generations through repeated burials, often of bundled bones. Some burials show unusual treatment, such as perforated long bones, removed skull bones and red ochre spread over the dead.

Objects in the mounds point to links with the Adena and Hopewell peoples of the Ohio valley, through the wide exchange network archaeologists call the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. Whether these contacts were direct or passed from group to group is not known. Laurel is generally seen as a northern regional form of the broad Middle Woodland pattern, alongside complexes such as Point Peninsula further east.

In the later first millennium CE the Blackduck tradition, with thinner and better-made pottery, spread through the same region. Around the Rainy River the two seem to have coexisted for several centuries before both gave way to new pottery styles around 1000 CE. The archaeologist K. C. A. Dawson argued that Blackduck represented an incoming population and linked it with the Ojibwe, though such links between pottery styles and modern peoples remain interpretations.

Our maps draw a territory labelled Laurel complex from 100 BCE to 500 CE (the 100 BCE, 1 BCE, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 maps), an approximate outline around the western Great Lakes and the boreal forest beyond. The culture's real span, as dated by archaeologists, began earlier in some accounts and lasted later than 500.