One long-standing challenge facing American archaeology is to understand momentous changes to the social landscape occurring after 1492. Some of the earliest archaeology conducted in this hemisphere, beginning more than a century ago, sought traces of initial European footholds on the fringes of Native America, more often to commemorate successes and failures of invaders than to consider the impacts of that invasion on indigenous peoples. Gradually, and especially since World War II, research interests have shifted. Today we recognize how much modern society can benefit from even-handed studies of past migrations, different forms of colonialism, and indigenous responses to both.

Archaeologists working in every region of the Americas have had to overcome numerous obstacles to make headway in this task. Some impediments are of our own making, such as the professed dichotomy between “prehistory” and “history” created by our discipline's founders. Other hurdles, like the never-ending quest for high-resolution temporal control, call for ever-increasing methodological virtuosity and innovation. Despite numerous difficulties, we are making progress.

This volume's 18 contributors have focused on the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence River and Gulf, from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean, during the sixteenth century, although more than a few consider a broader timeframe, with fifteenth-century data providing precontact contexts and consequences of contact revealed by reference to seventeenth-century studies. As is true of many other regions, the sixteenth-century documentary record of eastern Canada is both meagre and overwhelmingly Eurocentric in its biases. Indeed, the only widely known colonization effort of this era, the Cartier expeditions of 1534–1542 that established brief settlements at modern-day Québec City, provides most of the written record on the St. Lawrence Iroquois. On the other hand, modern research in archives in France and Spain has revealed surprisingly abundant documentation of seasonal cod fishing and whaling by Basques (and smaller numbers of French and Portuguese) on the Labrador coast and both shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, although with sparse mentions of the Native peoples. Archaeology in recent decades has contributed substantially to our knowledge of both of these prominent sixteenth-century colonization efforts, with major excavations at the Cartier-Roberval settlement at Cap-Rouge and the Basque tryworks at Red Bay, among others.

Editors Loewen and Chapdelaine have asked their volume contributors to look beyond these better-known aspects of the sixteenth-century St. Lawrence cultural scene to address the social networks that bound together Inuit, Innu (Algonquians), Iroquoians, and diverse Europeans across the region. Introduced European goods, especially glass beads, and pottery made by Europeans and Iroquoians are key to this effort, since they are the most firmly dated artifact categories available, thanks to decades of scholarly study. The numerous color photographs of key artifact types, by the way, are one highlight of this beautifully produced volume; two well-illustrated chapters summarizing typologies of sixteenth-century Basque pottery and European glass beads are another.

Apart from these significant material culture contributions, this volume's focus remains firmly on the cultural interactions between the region's many peoples, as inferred from the presence of artifacts of nonlocal origin. Most of the authors characterize this evident exchange of goods as “trade,” although most also acknowledge how little they know about the social mechanisms that transferred these goods from person to person throughout the region. Loewen and Chapdelaine cite earlier realizations by Bruce Trigger and Marcel Moussette that apparently uneven regional distributions of European artifacts in sixteenth-century Native contexts probably indicate differing intensities of interaction between communities and societies (p. 2).

Since different parts of the St. Lawrence watershed have received different levels of archaeological attention, this volume's authors set out to survey all available sixteenth-century data and to evaluate whether localized absence of evidence for interaction is merely apparent or real. By putting that notion to the test, they assembled more information on sixteenth-century interactions than anticipated, even from areas previously thought devoid of evidence. Nearly every chapter in this volume documents interaction routes that diverged from the main St. Lawrence corridor—for instance, up the Labrador coast through the Strait of Belle Isle; east to the French, Mi'kmaq, and Abenaki in Acadia; and up the Saguenay River at Tadoussac to Lac St.-Jean. The result is an intricate social network ripe for future analysis.