Point Peninsula complex

The Point Peninsula complex is the name archaeologists give to an Indigenous culture of the Middle Woodland period in southern Ontario, northern New York and neighbouring regions, usually dated from about 600 BCE to 700 CE. It is defined above all by a new style of thin, well-fired pottery, and by burial mounds that show its people took part in the far-reaching Hopewell exchange network centred in the Ohio valley.

Like most archaeological cultures, Point Peninsula is a label for a recurring set of artefacts rather than a name its people used. Its hallmark is a pottery also known as Vinette II. Compared with the thick, plainer vessels of earlier traditions, sometimes called Vinette I or Adena Thick, these pots had thinner walls, finer grit temper, better firing and more decoration. Where the technique came from is uncertain: there is little sign that it grew out of the older thick wares, and specialists have described its origin as a puzzle.

The new pottery appears in Canada from around 600 BCE. It reached parts of New England by about 200 BCE and, at some point between roughly 300 BCE and the start of the Common Era, spread to Maine and across the wider Maritime Peninsula.

Point Peninsula people lived mainly by hunting, fishing and gathering, with some cultivation. At sites such as Serpent Mounds on Rice Lake they camped, fished, collected freshwater mussels and harvested wild rice, known as manoomin.

Their burials link them to the Hopewell tradition, a web of exchange that began in the Ohio and Illinois valleys around 300 BCE. Some Point Peninsula dead were laid in mounds with exotic goods: copper and silver panpipes, marine shell gorgets and unusual cherts. Such rich grave goods may point to inherited differences in status. Nine panpipes, a typical Hopewell item, were found in the LeVesconte mound near Campbellford, Ontario, and much of the silver in Hopewell objects is thought to come from Cobalt, Ontario, a long way up the Ottawa River. The Lewiston Mound in Niagara County, New York, is another burial mound of this Hopewell-linked world. The Hopewell influence seems to fade around 250 CE, after which mound burial ceremonialism stopped.

The best-known Point Peninsula site is Serpent Mounds near Keene, Ontario, a National Historic Site since 1982 on land of the Hiawatha First Nation. Its nine earthen mounds were used for burials over about 350 years, ending around 300 CE. The largest winds like a snake for about 59 metres and is the only effigy mound of its kind in Canada; the smaller oval mounds beside it held human remains with shell and copper beads, fossil coral, a bone fish hook and tools.

In New York, Point Peninsula material was replaced around 900 CE by remains classed as Owasco, made by more settled maize, squash and bean farmers who lived in larger, often fortified villages. Owasco is thought to lie behind the later Iroquoian-speaking nations, including the Haudenosaunee, although one archaeologist, John P. Hart, argued in 2011 that no definable Owasco culture existed. How directly Point Peninsula communities fed into these later peoples remains debated.

Our maps label this area "Point Peninsula" from 100 BCE to 500 CE (the 100 BCE, 1 BCE, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 maps), covering the St Lawrence valley and lower Great Lakes in today's Canada and the United States; the outline is approximate. The same maps draw the Hopewell tradition to the south-west, while the earlier Adena culture appears on the maps from 500 to 200 BCE.