When we study about North American aboriginals we seldom, if ever, stop to explore the tremendous impact these Indians, as they were called, had on the European imagination. The first extended contact of the Mi’kmaq with European nations was with the Basque, English and French fishermen, beginning in the 15th Century – maybe even earlier. The most significant relationship was with the French in Acadia, and was one of quiet exploitation combined with religious conversion. Things did not get unpleasant until the mid-1750s, just before the Deportation, when a priest, the Abbé LeLoutre, caused a great deal of trouble, incited violence as a threat and perhaps actively caused funds required…

The Palaeo Indian period, which formed the basis of my discussion of stone tools and weapons in the preceding post, was a period of incredibly dynamic changes in the geology of Prince Edward Island. Looking again at these maps of the geological history of the region by Natural Resources Canada, we see that around 13,000 BP, with the great rise in water levels following the melting of the glaciers, the Island was three islands! Three thousand years later, the crust of the earth had rebounded to the point where there was a massive land corridor to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. This is the time when the Island was first…

The people who settled the Island 12,000 or so years ago brought with them a lithic or stone technology that far surpassed the core tool techniques that I illustrated in the previous post. True, the newcomers would have used all the kinds of core tools I described – and more even – in their lives as hunters and gatherers, but they brought with them a technique of converting special kinds of stone into spectacular blades such as we have observed in France and Spain, Clovis, New Mexico, and Debert in Nova Scotia. These blades are thin, with flakes knocked off to produce a lenticular (lens shaped) cross section and they…

The first humans to settle in North America had to face horrendous problems, not least of which was finding suitable lithic materials – rocks – to use in the making of their tools and weapons. Those who entered through the Beringia passage would have had a relatively easy time of it because as they moved down the continent temperatures were warmer and resources – animals, wood, rocks and food – were plentiful. If they moved east and settled Eastern Canada and the US, they would have had all these resources at hand along the way. It would have been a different story for the Solutrean settlers from Europe – if…

One early evening during the Lupine season when in 1983 David Keenlyside was opening his extensive dig at the Jones Site at Greenwich in Saint Peter’s Bay, I visited my friend Trevor who was a student excavator. We walked along the beach and while he shared the excitement of digging his first trench with me, we looked down at the shingle beach and there, sparkling with a reddish glow, was this point. It was my first prehistoric find ever!!! I was ravished!!!! At that moment my aesthetic life was very significantly changed in a lasting way. That evening has never faded from my mind and the moment of revelation is…