ABSTRACT
Americans know intuitively that maple sugar and maple syrup are among the things that spread from Indians to the rest of world culture after the discovery of the Americas by Europeans. The Indian origin of maple sugaring is one of those things that everyone knows. Maple sugar and maple syrup are together a sweet small something that came from the Indians, in what way or how is quite beside the point. The efforts of archaeologists to resuscitate Indian use of maple sugar in prehistory provoked another assessment of the ethnohistorical sources. The archaeological leap into the maple sugar problem highlights a difficulty with so much of ethnohistoric research: it is bounded by a single kind of evidence, the documentary one. The presence of maple sugaring on the periphery of the development of sugar as a commodity with a world market is too much of a coincidence to suppose them to be unrelated events.
