ancient toronto before 16th century - the history of toronto

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Ancient Toronto before 16th Century

- The History of Toronto

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After the Ice Age

After the Ice Age

Toronto has only more than 300 years of development as a city. From primitive men to crude fishing village, then to the arrival of French in 17th Century, finally to the biggest city in Canada. Toronto’s developing speed is amazing.

Today ResearchVit will introduce you the ancient part of Toronto’s history.

13,000 years ago, the one-km-thick glaciers of the last ice age melted northwards from southern Ontario, left behind large meltwater lakes. Geologists call one of those bodies of water ‘Lake Iroquois‘, which is much larger than Lake Ontario - Its water level was 40 metres higher than today's lake, which means the current downtown Toronto was once underwater.

Around 11,700 years ago, Lake Iroquois found St Lawrence as a new outlet to the Atlantic Ocean. That caused the lake to drain 100 metres below today's Lake Ontario 11,400 years ago, and makes its shoreline far to the south of the current one.


Ancient Toronto

Ancient Toronto

Around 10,500-11,000

years ago, a small

number of people moved

into the cold sub-arctic

landscape of ancient

Ontario from the south.

The shoreline of ancient

Lake Ontario lying about

20 kms south of modern

Toronto.These early inhabitants fished and gathered but relied mainly on hunting

caribou, as well as mammoths, mastodons, and smaller animals in a region

of tundra and boreal forest. They travelled across large distances in families

to sustain themselves.


Evolving SocietiesEvolving Societies(BC 6,000 – AD 600)

About 8,000 years ago, the climate warmed to similar to modern levels, new plants evolved in southern Ontario.

Indigenous people discovered a convenient shortcut between Lake Ontario in the south and Georgian Bay in the north. Later known as the ‘Toronto Passage’, the main branches of this route expands to a large area.

People expanded the range of foodstuffs as the climate and environment evolved, with fishing in particular growing in importance. Over the millennia, these indigenous societies grew in complexity. Related families began to congregate in large spring and summer camps near the mouths of rivers to catch fish, trade, and engage in communal social and spiritual events around 3,000 years ago. The population also rose through the centuries, to roughly 10,000 in southern Ontario by about 1,500 years ago, with possibly 500 people living along each of the major rivers in the Toronto area.

There are similarities in many of the excavated sites across the lower Great Lakes and by the presence of trade goods from far away, such as copper mined near Lake Superior and marine shell objects from today's southern United States.

↓Axe/Arrow heads(BC

1,000)


Iroquoian CulturesIroquoian Cultures

(AD 600 – 1600)

Beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco were introduced into Ontario from the south. As an important new corps, corn arrived roughly 1,400 years ago, became increasingly important in people's diets. The move towards farming helped shaping the horticultural Iroquoian societies that developed about 1,100 years ago in the lower Great Lakes.

↑Ceramic Pot and Bird Effigy (AD 1,300)Iroquoian Pipe (AD 1,500) →

An important shift showed that people slowly abandoned much of the mobility. In its place semi-permanent villages developed, people moved out during parts of the year to hunt, fish, gather, or otherwise meet their subsistence needs as supplements to the farming that lay at the heart of their work.

Iroquoian villages typically lasted from 10 to 20 years before their inhabitants relocated to new sites when the longhouses deteriorated. The old settlements served as meadowlands and thinly forested environments.


European GoodsEuropean Goods

(16th Century)

In 1534, the French sailor Jacques Cartier journeyed up the St Lawrence River as far as modern Montreal. Cartier's journey was the first well-documented record of European activity on the edge of the Great Lakes region. However, his memoirs clearly indicated that the aboriginal people he met on the St Lawrence had encountered whites previously, had traded furs for foreign goods, and had stored pelts in anticipation of future contacts.

In 14th to 16th centuries, the Iroquoians in Toronto and surrounding areas slowly moved north to the Georgian Bay to join the developing Huron confederacy. The new Huron confederacy used the now-uninhabited Toronto as part of their territory.

↑Native territories in 1600

Please keep an eye in Modern Toronto after 16th Century next week.


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Research Reference:

1. “First Peoples, 9000 BCE to 1600 CE”, City of Toronto;

2. “History of Toronto”, Lonely Planet; 3. “Images From Our Archives”, Toronto

Historical Association; 4. “History of Toronto”, Wikipedia.

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