From space to place: An archaeology and historical geography of the recent Indian period in Newfoundland

The foraging peoples who lived at the environmental and geographic “margins” of the earth have long captured the anthropological imagination for they appeared to reside at the very margins of history and human sustainability. The Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland are one such people. An earlier generation of anthropologists believed that the Beothuk represented an archaic culture that had survived into the modern era as a result of the island's remote location and isolation. They were also thought to inhabit an environment so austere as to have caused several human extinctions.; This dissertation explores anthropological ideas of marginal places and the foraging peoples that lived here through the story of the Beothuk and their ancestors. Focusing on the archaeological record of the “Recent Indian period,” an era that begins with the arrival of Indian peoples to Newfoundland during the first century A.D. and ends with the demise of the Beothuk in the 1820s, I suggest that these peoples' history was neither shallow nor narrowly determined by their environment. Indeed, rather than living at the margins of history, Newfoundland hunter-gatherers were often at the center of sweeping social changes. In the course of nearly two thousand years they witnessed the northward retreat of PaleoEskimo peoples, the arrival and departure of Norse explorers, and the suffocating influx of European fishermen and settlers.; Each of these “events” helped form a new social environment within which hunter-gatherers had to negotiate. One important way that they did this was through the landscape—by maneuvering and occupying places differently depending on their own objectives and the nature of the social environment at the time. In the end I suggest that hunter-gatherer adaptations in Newfoundland were always situated and conditioned by the social environment, and that within this context, the landscape served as an important “place” in the “adaptive” process.