ABSTRACT
The Northeastern Forests lie between the Canadian Subarctic and those portions of the Eastern Woodlands where the Adena, Hopewell, and later Mississippian traditions arose. The subregion includes the Great Lakes. It was home to historic tribes speaking mainly Algonquian and Iroquoian languages. A series of earlier Archaic cultures emerged across the Great Lakes region and along the Northeast coast after 5000 bce, creating a foundation for later lifeways that persisted into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Burial mounds analogous to those in the central Eastern Woodlands were constructed in some portions of the Northeast, but Mississippian colonies largely did not penetrate into this region. Maize, beans, and squash were cultivated in the southern portions of the Northeastern Forests where farming was viable. Variants of this economy sustained semi-permanent communities of longhouses and wigwams. The arrival of French, Dutch, and English colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries transformed the region, as the fur trade was the primary driver of change prior to the wars between the contending European powers.
