Discover Toronto's history as told through its plaques

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Indian Village Site

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted October, 2006

Just at the entrance to Birkdale Ravine on the west side of Brimley Road north of Lawrence Avenue there is a plaque erected by the Scarborough Historical Society which reads:

Coordinates: 43.761176 -79.258257

A village inhabited by early Iroquoian Indians stood on the north side of this Highland Creek valley about 1250 AD. This site was excavated in 1956 by University of Toronto students who recovered numerous projectile points, tools, and fragments of pipes and globular bodied pottery with simple geometric line decorations. Inside a palisade, the people of the village dwelt in large multiple family longhouses constructed of slender poles covered with slabs of bark. Down the centre of each house was a line of fireplaces used for cooking and heating. The inhabitants lived by fishing, hunting, and primitive agriculture growing corn, beans, squash and pumpkins. The bones of their dead were buried in mass graves on a hilltop a short distance east of the village where two ossuaries containing the remains of 472 individuals were discovered in August, 1956.

Related webpage
Iroquois

More
First Nations

Here are the visitors' comments for this page.

Posted January 6, 2014
Hi. Very interesting post. I am not familiar with the term "primitive agriculture". Is that like subsistence farming?
Thanks, Denise Minick

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