Beginning about 1000 CE, Iroquoian-speaking people settled along the St. Lawrence River, where they practised agriculture along with hunting and fishing. Archeological surveys have revealed that by 1300, they built fortified villages similar to those seen and described by French explorer Jacques Cartier in the mid-16th century, when he visited Hochelaga and Stadacona. By 1600, however, the villages and people were gone. Since the 1950s, historians and anthropologists have used archeological and linguistic evidence to develop a consensus that the people formed a distinct ethnic group, whom they have called St. Lawrence Iroquoians. They spoke Laurentian and were separate from the powerful Iroquois confederacy of nations that developed in present-day New York and Pennsylvania along the southern edges of the Great Lakes.