European Contact on the Maritime Peninsula

Summary

The onset of European contact along the Maine-Maritime coast has been the subject of many varied scenarios for more than a century. Leaving aside the matter of Norse visitation, for which there is scant evidence at best, the region was first visited by Europeans during the late sixteenth century and then again in the early seventeenth. But the impacts of these visits upon indigenous peoples are difficult to assess historically and archaeologically because of the region’s proximity to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where Europeans visited at earlier dates and in larger numbers. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw significant progress in sorting out these scenarios, and in this paper I will try to summarize the present state of our understanding.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• Revisiting Facts and Ideas of Contact in the St. Lawrence Basin during the 16th Century

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-36,02