The Big Apple of the 1500s

[Genichiro]

Today New York City is the Big Apple of the Northeast but new research reveals that 500 years ago, at a time when Europeans were just beginning to visit the New World, a settlement on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in Canada, was the biggest, most complex, cosmopolitan place in the region.

Occupied between roughly A.D. 1500 and 1530, the so-called Mantle site was settled by the Wendat (Huron). Excavations at the site, between 2003 and 2005, have uncovered its 98 longhouses, a palisade of three rows (a fence made of heavy wooden stakes and used for defense) and about 200,000 artifacts. Dozens of examples of art have been unearthed showing haunting human faces and depictions of animals, with analysis ongoing.

Full article here

This is quite the discovery. It is a shame that we didn't have good preservation laws to allow the site to remain more intact, but still, this is pretty cool. I actually like hearing about a group that tried to coexist with Native American tribes, rather than trying to kill them off. It's always fun to see how the current civilization we have compares to that of the older sites; shows that as much as we change over the centuries, some things stay the same.

[Cirno]

It would have been nice if they could have preserved the site a little better. That's still awesome that there was something like that here on this continent.

[Genichiro]

Indeed, all sites like this should be preserved in some way or form. At least they were able to preserve part of it. Perhaps sometime in the future, we'll have holograms capable of faithfully reproducing sites such as this, so we can have a way of exploring them that cannot be touched by disasters of the land.

[Cirno]

So, like Star Trek, right?

[Genichiro]

Yep, exactly!