Hearth and Home at Sabbath Point: A Beothuk Housepit on Red Indian Lake, Newfoundland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We report on recent excavations at an unusual Beothuk housepit feature located on Red Indian Lake, in the interior of the island of Newfoundland, Canada. The housepit is remarkable for its large size and hexagonal shape, for having escaped destruction from logging, flooding, and earlier avocational investigations, and for the fact that it does not appear to have been embedded within a cluster of other housepits. Furthermore, excellent faunal preservation and material evidence suggesting that the house was occupied toward the end of the eighteenth century, offer an extraordinary opportunity to investigate Beothuk lifeways at a critical point in the history of these people. In this paper we discuss our archaeological research at the site and situate these findings within the broader context of what is known of Beothuk architecture and settlement organization at the end of the eighteenth century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30920