The Draper Site

The Draper archaeological site is the site of a large Huron village that was occupied at approximately A .D .1500 (click here to see an artist's reconstruction of the Draper Site). Four hundred and seventy years later, the site was threatened by the proposed construction of the new Toronto International Airport at Pickering, Ontario. This prompted the Archaeological Survey of Canada, National Museum of Man, to organize an archaeological excavation to investigate the site, before it would be destroyed by the construction of the proposed airport. The excavations were financed by Transport Canada and the Archaeological Survey of Canada, National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada.

The Huron Indians were a confederacy of tribes who spoke an Iroquoian language. They lived in south-central Ontario from approximately A.D. 1400 until A.D. 1649, at which date they were defeated by some of the Iroquoian tribes who lived south of Lake Ontario. The history of their ancestors, the Middleport and Pickering peoples, can be traced back to approximately A.D. 700. Our knowledge of the Huron is based on archaeological excavations and on reports written by missionaries and explorers who visited the Huron in the seventeenth century.

The Huron lived in semipermanent villages that were composed of a number of longhouses. The longhouses were made from a framework of poles covered with elm or cedar bark and were generally 20 to 25 feet wide, ranging in length from 40 to 250 feet, and probably 15 to 25 feet in height. Within the houses there was a central corridor and, along each wall, platforms about 5 feet wide. Along the corridor, at approximately 20-foot intervals, were hearths, each of which was shared by two families. Each family occupied the platform and the adjacent space on one side of the house. Thus, the length of the house was determined by the number of families occupying it.

The number of houses in a village varied, but would generally be from ten to twenty. The villages, with populations estimated at 500 to 1,000 individuals, usually covered two to five acres, often surrounded by a stockade. The stockade was constructed of one to three rows of poles, probably 20 to 30 feet high, placed in the ground at approximately one-foot intervals. The space between the poles was interwoven with bark and branches and thus formed an effective protection against attack by other Iroquoian peoples with whom the Huron were at war.

The Huron were agriculturalists whose diet was based primarily on corn, beans and squash. These crops were grown in fields surrounding the village. The diet was supplemented by hunting, fishing, and the gathering of a variety of wild plant foods.

One characteristic of the Huron was that they moved their villages every ten to twenty-five years. The reason for these moves is uncertain, although it may have involved the depletion of soil fertility or the firewood resources in the vicinity of the village. Since each village is a time capsule providing data about the way of life of the occupants over a relatively short period of time, the sites are valuable for archaeological investigation.

The Draper village (it is named after the family who owned the farm on which the site is located) is considered to be important because it was a relatively large village, covering an estimated eight acres. It is also unusual in that most of it had never been disturbed by ploughing.

As it was scheduled to be destroyed in the spring of 1976, the 1975 excavations at the Draper site were aimed at exploring the entire village. For six months a crew of from ten to sixty students worked at the site. The excavation had several purposes, such as: (1) to determine the nature of the village, including the size and location of houses and palisades and the number of people who lived there; and (2) to determine the diet of the Huron people who occupied the site.

Since only a limited amount of time was available, a new series of techniques of excavation was developed that involved the use of power equipment such as bulldozers and road graders. This permitted us to excavate five acres of the village before September 1975, when the proposed con-struction of the airport was cancelled.

The excavations produced a high quantity of artifacts including more than 200,000 pieces of clay pottery vessels, several thousand clay pipe fragments (click here to see an effigy pipe bowl), thousands of bone and stone artifacts, and a few rare items such as a masquette and a small effigy of a bear made from clay (click here to see clay effigies). In addition, eighteen middens, or garbage dumps, were excavated and the remains of thirty-four longhouses recorded.

One of the most fascinating discoveries was that the Draper village underwent at least six expansions during its short period of occupation. It began as a small village of ten houses with an estimated population of approximately 600 people in an area of two acres. At the time it was abandoned, the village contained probably forty-five or fifty houses, occupied by approximately 2,000 to 2,500 people. The village covered an estimated fifteen acres, surrounded by three rows of palisade. The houses were placed to form a number of central areas, or plazas, which were readily defensible (click here to see a possible sequence of village expansion of the Draper site).

An interesting discovery was the recovery of four copper beads and a copper ring which are of European origin (click here to see some examples). This suggests that the Huron gained access to trade goods earlier than was previously thought and, in conjunction with the evidence of amalgamation of villages, could mean that warfare was increasing, due probably to competition over access to trade routes

Our studies of the Huron subsistence practices at the Draper site support the historical evidence that corn, beans and squash were the mainstay of the diet, which was supplemented by the hunting of mammals, particularly deer, bear, woodchuck and racoon. In addition, a wide variety of wild plant foods was collected, including rasp-berry, strawberry, blueberry, elderberry and acorns.

Since 1975, a crew of from four to eight have been working in the laboratories of the Museum of Indian Archaeology at the University of Western Ontario describing and analyzing the artifacts recovered. After two years, we are beginning to reconstruct the way of life of the people who lived on the site and are preparing a series of reports that will present our findings.