Tonawanda Island area Neutral sites, Aboriginal Occupation of New York, p109 (Bulletin of the New York State Museum, 1900).jpg

Tonawanda Island area Neutral sites, Aboriginal Occupation of New York, p109 (Bulletin of the New York State Museum, 1900).jpg

William M. Beauchamp’s Aboriginal Occupation of New York was published by the New York State Museum in 1900 as a preliminary statewide inventory of Indigenous sites. Beauchamp assembled reports from earlier investigators such as E. G. Squier, consulted maps, local histories and the Jesuit Relations, corresponded with collectors and residents, and added observations from his own fieldwork. He repeatedly warned that the record was incomplete: some counties had been closely studied, while others were represented only by old reports whose sites and artifacts had already disappeared. His work is therefore most valuable as a record of what was still known in the nineteenth century, not as a modern archaeological survey.

Beauchamp believed that the Neutral or Attiwandaron people had once occupied the country east of the Niagara River and north of the Erie Nation, although most of their villages lay in present-day Ontario. He thought that they may once have maintained a considerable population in Western New York, but gradually withdrew westward as the Senecas and the other Haudenosaunee nations grew more powerful. He tentatively placed the southern limit of Neutral territory around Eighteen Mile Creek. Within that general framework, Niagara County—including the Niagara River corridor and the Tonawandas—belonged to the former Neutral sphere, although Beauchamp did not claim that every site he cataloged could be assigned confidently to one nation.

At Tonawanda, Beauchamp recorded a circular mound on the upper end of Tonawanda Island and a larger mound, reportedly fifteen feet high, opened by Squier in 1848. Beneath it was a stone circle containing small groups of bones representing adults and children; the remains had apparently been gathered only after the flesh had disappeared, making this a clear case of secondary burial. Beauchamp also listed an open-air flint-working site covering about an acre opposite the island at the mouth of Tonawanda Creek, as well as another poorly documented site northwest of North Tonawanda. He preserved these reports but did not demonstrate that the mound, workshop and other sites were contemporary or parts of a single settlement.

Later professional archaeology broadly supports Beauchamp’s larger conclusion that Neutral communities extended across the Niagara River into Western New York, while treating individual identifications much more cautiously. Marian White identified the Van Son site on Grand Island as Neutral, dating it to about 1635–45, and proposed that one or more Neutral communities moved eastward from the Ontario interior to the Niagara River and briefly established settlements beyond it. She connected sites at St. Davids, Grand Island, Kienuka and Cambria with this movement, while emphasizing that many locations were destroyed, poorly recorded or represented by scattered collections. Thus Beauchamp’s regional picture holds up surprisingly well, but modern scholarship requires diagnostic artifacts, chronology and settlement relationships before labeling a particular mound or village “Neutral.” The Tonawanda Island burial is securely describable as an Iroquoian secondary burial; its precise date, community and connection to a Huron-style Feast of the Dead remain plausible rather than proven. (ontarioarchaeology.org)

(AI summary)

The Tonawanda Island burial mound

The best available description is that the Tonawanda Island mound was a late-prehistoric communal burial place, probably made by Neutral people sometime in the sixteenth century or possibly the opening years of the seventeenth. That dating remains broad because the mound was opened before scientific archaeology, and no securely documented European trade goods were reported with the burials. A later archaeological survey accordingly classified Tonawanda Island and “White’s Island” among the prehistoric ossuaries of the Niagara Frontier, while noting that most such sites cannot be dated closely or tied to a particular village. One early investigator nevertheless judged the form of burial “distinctly Neutral.” (New York Archaeology)

The mound contained several small deposits of bones within a stone circle about ten feet across. Each deposit represented perhaps three or four people, including both adults and children. The bodies had plainly not been buried there intact: the bones were gathered only after the flesh had disappeared and were then placed together beneath the mound. Traces of fire appeared on the surrounding stones, and objects of bone and antler were also found. Beauchamp’s account therefore establishes the mound as a secondary communal burial, rather than an ordinary cemetery in which people were buried individually soon after death.

Its likely purpose was to provide a final resting place for the dead of a family, lineage or community after an earlier period of temporary burial or exposure. That practice strongly resembles the Feast of the Dead known among the Huron-Wendat and Neutral peoples. It cannot be proved that the Tonawanda mound was created during that precise ceremony—the excavation record is much too poor—but the combination of defleshed remains, people of different ages, grouped secondary deposits and monumental covering makes that the most persuasive interpretation.

The Feast of the Dead

Among the Huron-Wendat, ordinary burial was understood as temporary. Approximately every eight to twelve years, communities exhumed those who had died since the previous ceremony. Their bones were cleaned, wrapped and brought to a chosen gathering place. Several villages might attend, accompanied by feasting, mourning, gift exchange and councils. At the ceremony’s culmination, the bundled remains were placed together in a prepared communal pit. The ceremony honored individual relatives, but it also did something larger: by placing the dead together, living communities renewed kinship obligations, alliances and their collective identity. (Ontario Archaeological Society)

The Neutrals practiced a closely related ceremony. A Jesuit account from 1640–41 says that Neutral families sometimes kept bodies in their houses until decomposition forced their removal, placed them on scaffolds, then recovered the bones and displayed them in their cabins until the Feast of the Dead. Their customs were therefore not merely inferred from Huron practice; the ceremony is explicitly attested among the Neutral, although its full Neutral form was never described as completely as the Huron-Wendat ceremony witnessed in 1636. (Ontario Archaeological Society)

A terminology caution is useful here. “Huron” does not properly include the Neutral Nation. The Huron-Wendat, Neutral or Attawandaron, and Petun or Tionontati were distinct peoples and political confederacies. All spoke related Northern Iroquoian languages, as did the five—and later six—nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Neutral were therefore Iroquoian-speaking, but they were neither Huron-Wendat nor members of the Haudenosaunee League. Older writers used expressions such as “Huron-Iroquois” or “Ontario Iroquois” for this broader linguistic and cultural family, which can misleadingly sound as though all belonged to one political nation. The safest wording is:

The mound was probably created by Neutral people, a Northern Iroquoian-speaking nation distinct from both the Huron-Wendat Confederacy and the Haudenosaunee League. Its secondary burials may represent the Neutral form of the communal Feast of the Dead.

The Huron-Wendat buried bodies promptly and later removed them for the Feast of the Dead. Neutral families, he wrote, often retained bodies in their cabins until decomposition forced their removal, placed them on scaffolds, then recovered the bones and displayed them inside their homes “until the feast of the Dead.” Thus the Neutral ceremony itself is not merely inferred: the Jesuits named it and described the preparatory treatment of the remains. The caution is that Neutral burial practice had its own forms. Neutral ossuaries were often smaller than the immense Huron-Wendat pits, and Neutral communities also used individual graves, small group burials and burials within or near longhouses. Even Beauchamp warned that Western New York burial customs varied greatly and that relatively few sites displayed unmistakable evidence of the “great Huron feast of the dead.”

Still, the Neutral and Huron-Wendat were neighboring Northern Iroquoian-speaking peoples with closely related longhouse, agricultural and mortuary traditions; both temporarily kept or buried bodies, subsequently collected the bones, and finally placed multiple dead together. Archaeologists have also documented secondary burials and ossuaries at Neutral sites. Comparative scholarship therefore treats communal ossuary burial as a practice shared—though not necessarily performed identically—among the Huron-Wendat, Petun and Neutral peoples.

1900