The Archaeology of an Early Resource-Extraction Industry: The Cod Fishery, 1600-1713

Summary

As much as popular histories overlook it, the cod fishery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the first significant numbers of Europeans to North American shores and provided the earliest colonists in the northeast with an economic foundation from which to build new societies. As an industry which was an important staple for two regions the cod fisheries deserve careful study, but it has only been in the last decades that archaeologists and historians have undertaken critical studies on the topic, correcting centuries of myth-building and misconceptions. This paper continues this process by applying a newly-developed holistic analytical framework to archaeological and historical data from fisheries sites in Maine and Newfoundland with the intent of understanding the different processes which drew fishermen to North America, how this industry affected societal development in the colonies, and the factors which led to the differential development of Newfoundland and New England.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2016   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 55