35 
It is possible, also, if the use of the pump drill for fire-making was not 
recently introduced among the Iroquois, that the wooden disk, seen in 
Plate XVII, figure 11, was the whorl of such an apparatus. Although it is 
much smaller and thinner than those of modern drills, it may have been 
sufficiently heavy to give momentum to a small spindle.. 
The methods of cooking used by the people of this site probably were 
the same or differed only slightly from those of the other Iroquois, which 
have been described by early travellers and missionaries. We have, of 
course, very little direct evidence of cooking, beyond the fact that the 
inside of some of the pots is incrusted with the carbonized remains of food 
cooked in them. Burnt stones, which were found almost everywhere at 
the site, were probably used as props to keep the cooking pots upright, 
and may perhaps have been heated and dropped into vessels containing 
the water in which food was boiled. Corn and other plant foods may 
have been roasted in the hot ashes and meat was probably roasted, before 
open fires. Cartier, speaking of the corn meal made by the Indians of 
Hochelaga, says they knead it “ into dough, of which they make small 
loaves, which they set on a broad hot stone and then cover them with hot 
pebbles. In this way they bake their bread for want of an oven ” (page 
157). If this method were followed here it might account for some of 
the many burnt stones. One method of baking corn is suggested by two 
whole lumps of burnt clay (Plate XVII, figures 15 and 16) and a frag- 
ment of another, which bear the imprint of corn leaves and look as if 
they had been wrapped in corn leaves and tied and then baked. They 
may have been made by children in imitation of their elders who, per- 
haps, like the Mohawk described by De Vries (page 107), made corn- 
meal cakes similar to the leaf-bread tamales or packages of the modern 
Iroquois, described by Parker (2:66) and Waugh (page 99), and baked 
them in the ashes. The cords that held the corn leaves in place, as on 
the leaf-bread packages illustrated by Waugh in his Plate XXXIII, figures 
h , c, probably caused the constrictions seen on the earthenware objects. 
The shape of these objects is also suggestive of Sagard’s description of the 
Huron bread, which was “made like two balls joined together” (1:94). 
POTTERY 
The pottery recovered from this site w r as mostly in fragments, of 
which there are nearly eleven thousand. The only whole pots are small 
toy vessels. Five thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight of the frag- 
ments are pieces of rims, representing about four thousand eight hundred 
and eighty-eight pots. 
The fragments were found in all of the refuse deposits. The larger 
pieces owe their size to the fact that they were buried beyond plough 
depth. 
The pots varied in size from a little toy vessel, about f inch wide and 
the same in height (Cat. No. VIII-F-11244) , to some that were about 14 
inches across the top and probably about 18 inches high, with a capacity 
of perhaps 3 or 4 gallons. Most of the pots seem to have been about 10 
to 12 inches high with the body from 7 to 9 inches in diameter across the 
bilge. In general the larger pots seem to have been smaller than those 
from Neutral sites in southwestern Ontario. 
