1. Tell us about your writing team. As a husband and wife, how did you begin writing together?
Actually, we teamed up as writers before we were married. Kathleen read Mike’s first novel and said, “All of your female characters should be murdered in the first chapter. You don’t really think women act like that, do you?” Since he wanted a third date, he let her rewrite them.
2. How does your background(s) as archaeologists inform your writing?
Archaeology is the heart of what we write. The science has been a part of our lives since long before we went to college–for example, Kathleen was on her first archaeological excavation at the age of ten–but certainly our academic backgrounds and our 35 years of archaeological field experience have become the cornerstones of our books. Our stories always begin and end with the archaeological record, and what it tells us about the rise and fall of prehistoric civilizations.
3 & 7. How do you re-create a world that is 600 years old? How much research do you complete for each book?
Writing fiction based upon archaeology and history is a balancing act. We always start with the archaeological record. It establishes the basic facts of what was happening in the 1400s. For example, we know from the burned villages and mutilated bodies, including those of children, that the warfare was brutal. Then we move to the historical record, and ask, what was the culture like at the point of contact with Europeans? By studying the Mourning Wars of the 1600s we get a clearer understanding of the practice of Iroquoian warfare, particularly how captives were taken and treated. Lastly, we study the oral history that has been passed down for centuries. There are literally hundreds of versions of the Peacemaker story.
For us, the hardest part of writing these books was selecting which details of Iroquoian oral history to use. We had to establish a kind of oral history baseline, which means that we looked for commonalities in the stories. Where many versions agreed, like on the subject of where Dekanawida was born, we used that detail. If stories disagreed dramatically, for example on what happened to him at the end of his life, we had real decisions to make. For the most part, we try to write about human beings, not divine beings, and that posed a problem here. Some versions of the Peacemaker story have Dekanawida establishing peace among the Iroquois, then traveling across the ocean to become the person known as Jesus. We chose not to use this element of oral history, not because we disbelieve, but rather because it seemed unlikely that this was part of the Peacemaker story prior to the arrival of missionaries in the 1600s. Making such decisions is, undoubtedly, the greatest challenge of writing prehistorical fiction.
4. Tell us about the Iroquois. What was their language like? What was their culture like?
Northern Iroquoian languages are very beautiful and sophisticated, containing nuances that can’t be duplicated in English. However, the origins of Northern Iroquoians is a hotly debated and very complex topic among archaeologists. Generally, we agree that the period from roughly A.D. 1000-1450 demonstrates fluid and shifting alliances, expanding trade networks, and changing settlement patterns. One thing is for certain: early Iroquoian cultures were remarkably adaptable and diverse.
At around A.D. 1000–the period we wrote about in People of the Masks–most Iroquoian peoples lived in small fishing villages or farming hamlets, primarily along rivers where they had good fertile soils and easy access to water. Toward the end of this period, they began moving away from watercourses and started building their villages atop easily defensible hilltops. Some were palisaded. For example, the Bates site in Chenango county, and the Sackett site near Canandaigua, New York, both of which date to the thirteenth century. The period we’re writing about in People of the Longhouse and The Dawn Country is the Late Iroquoian, which lasted from around A.D. 1350 to European contact. This is a critical period. At around A.D. 1400, the first evidence for individual tribes appears. Differences in pottery styles, burial customs, and types of houses, demonstrate divisions between Iroquoian groups. As well, small villages begin to amalgamate with larger ones, forming cohesive social groups, or, we suspect, nations.
A.D. 1400 is also the time when the Iroquois were building the most impressive longhouses, and many were elaborately fortified. At the Schoff site outside of Onondaga, New York, the people constructed a longhouse 400 feet long, twenty-two feet wide, and nearly as tall. The palisaded settlement may have housed 1,500 to 2,000 people, consisting of many different clans.
As people who’ve read our previous books know, often this type of aggregation is a telltale sign for archaeologists of interpersonal violence. Simply put, people crowd together for defensive purposes. This is also when cannibalism first appears in the Iroquoian archaeological record in the form of cut and cooked human bones.
Why did warfare break out? The fact that the climate had grown cooler and drier certainly contributed to the violence. We know that droughts were more frequent, growing seasons shorter, and food shortages probably more common. As well, larger villages deplete resources at a faster rate. Game populations, nut forests, firewood, and fertile soils would all have played out more quickly, which means they must have had to move their villages more often. Moving may have brought them into conflict with neighbors who needed the food resources just as desperately.
The warfare, we know, was violent.
At the Alhart site in the Oak Orchard Creek drainage in western New York, archaeologists found evidence of burned longhouses and food, and the dismembered remains of seventeen people–most of them male. Historically, it was common practice for women and children to either be killed on site, or taken captive and marched away while the male warriors were tortured and killed. At this site, the fragments of a child’s skull were found in one storage pit, and the skull of a woman in another storage pit. As well, fifteen male skulls were found in a storage pit on top of charred corn, and were probably placed there as severed heads, in-the-flesh. Some of them were burned. Two had suffered blows to the front of the head. We discuss many other such examples in the foreword to The Dawn Country.
As well, artifacts made from human bone are plentiful on Northern Iroquoian sites that date from the late fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. For example, two skulls were found at the Parsons site in Toronto. The Parsons site was an elaborately palisaded fifteenth century village. The two skulls, one male and one female, were found in a trash pit inside the inner palisade. Many other human bone artifacts are found in similar “refuse” situations. Human skull pendants or rattles are found across Ontario and New York at the Moatfield, Winking Bull, Uren, Pound, Crawford Lake, Jarret-Lahmer, Draper, Keffer, Lawson, Campbell, Clearview, Parsons, Beeton, Roebuck, Lite, Salem, and Glenbrook sites. Often the skulls, or skull fragments, have cut marks made by stone tools that are suggestive of scalping (as you already know from earlier paragraphs, it was not a French custom brought to the New World and adopted by the tribes. Scalping existed long before Europeans arrived). Such skulls were found at the Draper, Keffer and Lawson sites. Ground and polished fibulas and femurs (leg bones), as well as arm bones (radii) were used for beads, and scraping tools. Pierced mandibles (jaws), and finger and toe bones, were used as pendants. Ulnae (arm bones) became awls or daggers, and were also strung as beads. Why is it important to archaeologists that all of these artifacts were found in trash middens? Because Iroquoian peoples took very good care of their dead relatives. They had lengthy, and beautiful, burial rituals to make certain their loved ones reached the Land of the Dead. Since these human remains were not properly cared for, it suggests the bones may have come from less valuable members of society, like enemy captives.
Let’s take a few moments to discuss the Iroquoian perspective on captives. By the l400’s, as it was in historic times, warfare and raiding for captives was probably the most important method of gaining prestige in Northern Iroquoian societies. When a person died, the spiritual power of the clan was diminished, especially if that person had been a community leader. The places of missing family members literally remained vacant until they could be “replaced,” and their spiritual power–which was embodied in their name–transferred to another person.
Historical records tell us that during the 1600’s, the Iroquois dispatched war parties whose sole intent was to bring home captives to replace family members and restore the spiritual strength of the clans. These were called “mourning wars.” Clan matrons usually organized the war parties and ordered their warriors to bring them captives suitable for adoption to assuage their grief and restock the village. Once the clan had a suitable replacement, the captive underwent the Requickening Ceremony. In this ritual, the dead person’s soul was “raised up” and transferred to the captive, along with his or her name.
This may seem odd to modern readers, but keep the religious context in mind. The Iroquois believed that the souls of those who died violently could not find the Path of Souls in the sky that led to the Land of the Dead. They were excluded from the afterlife and doomed to spend eternity wandering the earth, seeking revenge. However, such souls could find rest if they were transferred—along with their name—to the body of another person. In a very concrete way, the relatives of the dead person were trying to save him.
The souls of men and women killed in battles that were not “raised up” were believed, according to some Seneca traditions, to move into trees. It was these trees with indwelling warrior spirits that the People cut to serve as palisade logs, thereby surrounding the village with Standing Warriors.
Iroquoian oral history speaks of this as a particularly brutal time, and clearly the archaeological record supports their stories.
But the violence was also the catalyst for one of the most important events in the history of the world. It led to the rise of a legendary hero, a Peacemaker, named Dekanawida, who established the Great Law of Peace and founded of the League of the Iroquois–a confederacy of five tribes: the Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga and Seneca.
Without the League, the United States would not exist today, nor would our unique understanding of democracy. Concepts like one-person one-vote, or referendum and recall, were not European. They were Iroquoian.
And they would prove to be irresistible to the wave of colonists fleeing oppression in Europe.
In 1775, James Adair wrote a book called History of the American Indian, in which he described the Iroquoian system of government, by saying, “Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty…there is equality of condition, manners, and privileges…”
Indeed, the system of government espoused by the League was everything that Europeans monarchies were not. The Iroquois refused to put power in the hands of any single person, lest that power be abused. The League sought to maximize individual freedoms, and minimize governmental interference in people’s lives. The League taught that a system of government should preserve individual rights, while striving to insure the public welfare; it should reward initiative, champion tolerance, and establish inalienable human rights. They accepted as fact that men and women were equal and respected the diversity of peoples, their religions, economic and political ideals, their dreams.
On the eve of the American Revolution in 1776, English papers began circulating the following account, which was, incidentally, meant to be insulting: “The darling passion of the American is liberty, and that in its fullest extent; nor is it the original natives only to whom this passion is confined; our colonists sent thither seem to have imbibed the same principles.”
Indeed, they had.
Gifted writers like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would openly fan the flames of that “passion” for liberty, and set in motion a chain reaction that has yet to end. That passion would become a sweeping wildfire that would race around the globe and shape the very heart of what would, centuries later, become known as The Free World.
The Iroquois, quite simply, changed the course of history.
5. How did you come up with idea for book one, People of the Longhouse?
We’ve been studying Iroquoian cultures since 1978, so the idea has been percolating for a long time, but we couldn’t write this quartet of books about the founding of the League of the Iroquois until we’d set the stage first. It’s hard to understand any culture unless you grasp the people’s past. For example, no one could really understand America today if he or she didn’t know about the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, or the Civil War. That’s why we wrote the North America’s Forgotten Past series, to educate readers about North America’s magnificent prehistory. It’s taken us seventeen books to get to the point that we felt our readers would know enough to appreciate what happened with the Iroquois in the fifteenth century, and the impact they had on the future.
6. In Book 2, The Dawn Country, you continue the series. I understand this will be part of a quartet. What can we expect to see in Book 3?
Yes, the People of the Longhouse saga will have four books. The first duology chronicles the childhoods of the leading characters, and the second duology follows them as adults. In the third book, The Broken Land, readers will see Odion, Wrass, Zateri and Baji, as adults fighting for the life of their world. They’ll also see Odion, now Sky Messenger, be married and began the struggle for peace.
8. As a writing team, how do you divide up your books?
Because we have different expertises in archaeology and history, the best qualified person drafts out the bare bones of the plot and characters. Then we end up handing the book back and forth a dozen times, rewriting each other’s writing, adding more details, internal thoughts, and honing the action sequences, until we’re both happy with it. We wouldn’t recommend our technique for other couples, however. Writing is a very personal art, one where you infuse the words with your heart and soul. Allowing another person to tear your story apart and put it back together again requires absolute faith in your partner’s talent.
Thanks, Maxine!
Michael and Kathleen
W. Michael and Kathleen O’Neal Gear
Authors of
The People of the Longhouse, et. al
Maxine Thompson: Thank you for a fine interview. W. Michael and Kathleen O’Neal Gear
