archaeological and textual records - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell ...

ings may have also been secular trade items (Cleland 1972:202). This idea continues
to inform modern scholarship.
Two years after Cleland published, Alice Wood compiled the vital “Catalogue
of Jesuit and Ornamental Rings from Western New York State.” Wood was a long-
time volunteer in the Rochester Museum’s Rock Foundation Collection (George
Hamell, personal communication 2009). As the title suggests, her work provided a
count and a working typology of all Jesuit and so-called “secular” rings among the
Seneca sites. Given the more recent and continuing excavations of Seneca sites, one of
the goals of this thesis is to update Wood’s data.
After Wood, the scholarly front remained relatively quiet until 1986, when
Adrian Mandzy wrote a paper that suggested an implicit link between the rings and the
Jesuits. Specifically, he states that the rings are representative of “the golden age of
Christianization,” (Mandzy 1986:8). This is undoubtedly flawed; his language
suggests that the rings are indicative of mass religious conversions occurring among
the Five Nations when such a thing never took place. Mandzy also uses Cleland’s
system of using the rings to date sites; this too is incorrect (Mandzy 1986:9), as the
methodology only echoes Quimby’s errors, and thus does not reflect the currently
accepted revised Seneca site sequence.
The most recent and thorough “ring scholar” is Carol Mason. She has
published four papers so far on the subject and continues to conduct research. Mason’s
2003 piece, “Jesuit Rings, Jesuits and Chronology” is especially relevant to this study,
as it brings to light several problems with previous scholarship. She emphasizes that
we cannot rely on old historical sources such as Beauchamp who once wrote: “they
42