Adirondack Mountains. The Adirondack Mountains form a massif in northeastern New York, United States.
Its boundaries correspond to the boundaries of Adirondack Park. The mountains form a roughly circular dome, about 160 miles in diameter and about 1 mile high.
The current relief owes much to glaciation. The word Adirondack is thought to come from a Mohawk word meaning eaters of trees.
The earliest written use of the name, spelled Rontaks, was in 1729 by the French missionary Joseph-François Lafitau. He explained that the word was used by the Iroquoians as a derogatory term for groups of Algonquians who did not practice agriculture and therefore sometimes had to eat tree bark to survive harsh winters.
As the Mohawks had no written language at the time, Europeans used various phonetic spellings of the word, including Achkokx, Rondaxe, and Adirondax. Such words were strongly associated with the region, but they were not yet considered a place name--an English map from 1761 labels the area simply Deer Hunting Country. In 1837, the mountains were named Adirondacks by Ebenezer Emmons. Humans have lived in the region of the Adirondack Mountains since the Paleo-Indian period, shortly after the last ice age. The first group to move into the area came south from the St. Lawrence River Valley and settled along the shores of the Champlain Sea around 13,000 BC. These people, known as the Laurentian culture, were
Its boundaries correspond to the boundaries of Adirondack Park. The mountains form a roughly circular dome, about 160 miles in diameter and about 1 mile high.
The current relief owes much to glaciation. The word Adirondack is thought to come from a Mohawk word meaning eaters of trees.
The earliest written use of the name, spelled Rontaks, was in 1729 by the French missionary Joseph-François Lafitau. He explained that the word was used by the Iroquoians as a derogatory term for groups of Algonquians who did not practice agriculture and therefore sometimes had to eat tree bark to survive harsh winters.
As the Mohawks had no written language at the time, Europeans used various phonetic spellings of the word, including Achkokx, Rondaxe, and Adirondax. Such words were strongly associated with the region, but they were not yet considered a place name--an English map from 1761 labels the area simply Deer Hunting Country. In 1837, the mountains were named Adirondacks by Ebenezer Emmons. Humans have lived in the region of the Adirondack Mountains since the Paleo-Indian period, shortly after the last ice age. The first group to move into the area came south from the St. Lawrence River Valley and settled along the shores of the Champlain Sea around 13,000 BC. These people, known as the Laurentian culture, were
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