I recently saw an otherwise-excellent documentary, discussing Native American life in our area, which stated that Native peoples had farmed western New York for a thousand generations. Even conceding a generous rate of a new generation every twenty years, this would put that farming back 20,000 years. Since that was the middle of the Ice Age… the same Ice Age whose glaciers gouged out our Finger Lakes… farming must have been a little tricky.
It’s unlikely that human beings were in the New World at all 20,000 years ago, but by around 11,000 BCE it’s evident that Paleo-Indians were in New York, at least in small numbers. This was still a nomadic, hunting-and-gathering stone age lifestyle.
By 4000 BCE local people had settled communities, and were engaging in agriculture… although they still depended very heavily on what the forest and field brought forth on its own. (They had also, in classic human style, finished off the mammoths and mastodons.)
These folks engaged in extensive trade and travel, adopting and adapting elements of the moundbuilding culture that they visited in Ohio and points west. They brought up squash, beans, and corns of varieties that been developed in Mexico or further south.
By the tenth century CE the “Longhouse People” who later became the Iroquois were securely settled in New York, leaving their mountainous homeland in the American southeast. They had technology, social structure, and political organization that were all more sophisticated than those of their new neighbors, and quickly came to rule New York (where they lived roughly from Lake Champlain to the Genesee Valley), but also to dominate most of what’s now the northeastern United States and nearby Canada.
Around the same time that Columbus was invading the Caribbean the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) formalized a federation or league, making themselves into a superpower. In the 1600s European power began to eclipse theirs, but with skilled diplomacy and a considerable military they still kept themselves independent… despite European lust for Iroquois land… until after the American Revolution.
Our particular area was under Seneca rule, though the population was more mixed. The main Seneca cities were at the north end of the Finger Lakes, near what we today call Victor and Canandaigua. Refugees being driven from their homes by white aggression were allowed to settle in our area, forming a military frontier and a sort of “distant early warning” system for attacks from Pennsylvania.
This of course is only the sketchiest look at Native history in our area. But on Friday, December 5 Cornell Professor Kurt Jordan will be giving an illustrated presentation on the archaeology of Native American life in Central New York. It’s a free Steuben County Historical Society program, 1:30 in the hall of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Bath. We’d love to see you there.