Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers: Implications from Ethnohistory

Summary

Large portions of the world once were occupied by human populations subsisting by hunting, fishing and the gathering of wild plants. Archeologists have long been interested in understanding and explaining the life ways of these prehistoric populations. Human cultural evolution having proceeded as it did, almost no written records exist that report on human populations pursuing such a way of life in deciduous and boreal forestlands exist.

This is unfortunate for ethnographic analogy, when properly applied, can greatly enhance the ability of archeologists to build models and test hypotheses concerning prehistoric life ways. When Europeans, primarily the French, first reached Eastern Canada, they came into contact with some of the last remaining hunter-fisher-gatherer (h-f-g) populations living in mixed deciduous and boreal forests. New Brunswick, the Maritime Provinces and the lower St. Lawrence River Basin, as well as some regions to the north and west, were inhabited by such groups.

This thesis uses historical records--the writings of early explorers and missionaries who travelled and lived with Native American groups following a hunting-fishing-gathering way of life to reconstruct the settlement-subsistence of these people. The area from which most of the data is taken is the lower St. Lawrence River Basin, from the St. Maurice River eastward to the Seven Isles, north to the watershed with Hudson Bay, and south of the St. Lawrence River to the headwaters of New Brunswick's River St. John. This was, roughly, the territory occupied during the early historic contact period by several neighboring bands known collectively to the French as the Montagnais. They were h-f-g's and most of the text of this thesis describes their life ways. The aim of the thesis is to describe accurately the economic life ways of the Montagnais as an example of a viable, but now extinct, human adaption to a mixed deciduous and boreal forest environment. The Montagnais’ settlement-subsistence system is the focus of the reconstruction and interpretation for two reasons. First, it is regarded as the most accurate reflection of the total adaptive strategy of many human societies subsisting by hunting, fishing and gathering. Individual sites cannot be expected to provide adequate information on the behavior of human populations which adopted adaptive strategies involving seasonal movement (e.g. Fitting 1971; Thomas 1972). Second, human settlement and subsistence activities usually leave a material pattern that is more or less permanent upon the countryside.

This pattern, part of the archeological record, can be discovered, ordered and deciphered through the application of archaeological methods and techniques. This thesis is an attempt to aid these efforts and is presented in three parts. The first introduces the sources that have been used and several factors that must be considered when analyzing ethnohistoric data. The second describes an interpretation of the settlement-subsistence of the Montagnais. Their economic activities (i.e. procurement systems) are described. Then the yearly pattern of the economic activities is analyzed in light of seasonally and spatially variable food resources. The final part describes the archeological remains of such a settlement-subsistence system. Information in the final part, such as travelling distances or possible locations of sites, will be useful in formulating archeological research designs (e.g., as input for decisions about sampling strategies) and in relating the archeological record to prehistoric behavior.

Keywords

Temporal Coverage

Calendar Date: 1500 to 1750

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Francis McManamon

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