Friday, March 09, 2007

Other Weirs


Norman mentioned Al Lutins and a fishweir thesis over at Rock Piles. It is indeed very good, especially when he writes “Weirs themselves suffer from a lack of research in eastern North America. Both historic and prehistoric weirs dot the landscape, yet they seem to have escaped the attention of historians and archaeologists alike.”
I’ll add “much like rock piles and stone rows etc.”

One of Lutin’s Footnotes mentions “Toronto:”

In another area, Johnston and Cassavoy claim that the stakes are "oriented on the diagonal northwest-southeast and would serve to obstruct fish swimming upstream toward Lake Simcoe". Radiocarbon dates on a number of the stakes demonstrate that the weir was constructed during the Late Archaic (Johnston and Cassavoy 1978:704)
These are the (presumably uncorrected) radiocarbon dates listed in Table 1 on page 704: · 4560 ± 115 B.P. (2610 B.C.)· 4430 ± 95 B.P. (2480 B.C.)· 4500 ± 95 B.P. (2550 B.C.)· 4375 ± 95 B.P. (2425 B.C.)


http://www.lutins.org/thesis.html#4.1

I did a little google search and found this:



Origin of the Name Toronto
In 1670 the name Toronto made its first appearance in history as 'lac de Taranteau' on a map of southern Ontario drawn by the French priest Father Rene de Brenhant de Galinee.
By the 1720s, Toronto was accepted as referring to a trading post on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Humber River, where present-day Toronto is located.
The meaning of the word has been a subject to much discussion. The most popular interpretation originated with the nineteenth-century historian Henry Scadding, who claimed that it derived from a Huron word meaning 'to be plenty,' so that Toronto means 'plenty of people' or, as Scadding put it, 'meeting place.'
This interpretation is not accepted by many historians today, who are better versed in native languages. Current interpretations suggest the origin of the word Toronto in a Mohawk term for fish trap or weir, which were a noticeable feature of life around Lake Simcoe.
http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/jarvisci/toronto/tor_word.htm
I’ve gone back many a time to search more names and got stuff like this:

“We call ourselves Mitchikanibikok Inik, or in English, Algonquins of Barriere Lake. Our First Nation is one of ten Algonquin First Nations inhabiting the Ottawa River watershed along the border between the provinces of Quebec and Ontario approximately 3 hours drive north of Ottawa.
We take our name-" Mitchikanibikok Inik", meaning "the people of the stone fence or stone fish weir"-from our former rendezvous place of Barriere Lake at the headwaters of the Ottawa River.”
http://www.snowwowl.com/peoplealgonquin.html
More that have photos and pictures:
http://www.csasi.org/2004_october_journal/the_iowa_river_fish_trap_a_mystery_and_a_challenge.htm
http://www.igsb.uiowa.edu/Browse/precult/precult.htm
http://www.fromsitetostory.org/nhr/21ic0046thirdriverbridge/images/fig19u575.asp

http://www.victorianvilla.com/sims-mitchell/local/whispersofthe1700s.htm

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