Cultures Huron (Wendat) | Period Canada | |
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Location Pickering, Ontario, Regional Municipality of Durham, Ontario, Canada Periods Late Precontact Period, ca. 1475-1525 Region Regional Municipality of Durham | ||
The Draper Site is a precontact period (late fifteenth-century) Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on a tributary of West Duffins Creek in present-day Pickering, Ontario, approximately 35 kilometres northeast of Toronto. The site is found in wooded area on existing farmland and access by walking from the end of North Road.
The Huron community on the Draper site expanded at least five times over fifty years, with a total of 35 longhouses that held up to 2000 people. They were located on four hectares of land and the settlement was fortified with multiple rows of palisades. The expansion of the village coincided with the abandonment of small villages in the area. In the early sixteenth-century, after about a generation on the Draper site, the entire community moved five kilometres northwest to establish a new settlement, which archeologists have named the Mantle Site. The latter is located in the southeast corner of present-day Stouffville. The same community appears to have left the Mantle site circa 1550 to establish the so-called Ratcliff site and the Aurora or Old Fort site to the north-west in what is today the Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville.
In early 1975 and 1978, the largely undisturbed Draper Huron village site was completely excavated. This archeological work was to explore and salvage artifacts and evidence in preparation for the destruction of the site during the construction of the Pickering Airport.