Jon Parmenter

Jon Parmenter is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. Parmenter is the author of The Edge of the Woods as well as numerous articles on Native American studies.

Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701

Jon Parmenter

WINNER: 2010 PROSE Award Honorable Mention

Drawing on archival and published documents in several languages, archaeological data, and Iroquois oral traditions, The Edge of the Woods explores the ways in which spatial mobility represented the geographic expression of Iroquois social, political, and economic priorities. By reconstructing the late precolonial Iroquois settlement landscape and the paths of human mobility that constructed and sustained it, Jon Parmenter challenges the persistent association between Iroquois 'locality' and Iroquois 'culture,' and more fully maps the extended terrain of physical presence and social activity that Iroquois people inhabited. Studying patterns of movement through and between the multiple localities in Iroquois space, the book offers a new understanding of Iroquois peoplehood during this period. According to Parmenter, Iroquois identities adapted, and even strengthened, as the very shape of Iroquois homelands changed dramatically during the seventeenth century.

B/W illustrations, 7x10, maps, notes, bibliography, index world rights 520 pp., 6.00" x 9.00", October 2010 Cloth, $49.95, 0-87013-985-1 978-0-87013-985-7