History
During the Second World War, a major air base and staging area for men and convoy material being shipped from Halifax to Britain was established in the Debert area. In 1943, construction began to expand parking facilities for military divisions stationed at the site. [2] The parking lot expansion and mortar range activity near the end of the war subsequently decapitated the deposit and left only a small portion of the ancient site to be investigated. Excavations at the site covered approximately seven acres, however further test excavations would reveal that the original occupation covered at least twenty acres. [2]
The site was first discovered on August 29, 1948, by E.S. Eaton and his wife who noticed an abundance of blueberries growing in the area. [1] Wind erosion had exposed a small number of artifacts on the bulldozed surface of the parking lot. Eaton, who worked at the Truro Agricultural College and also incorporated archaeology into his agricultural investigations, collected artifacts from the site for several years after he and his wife first discovered the site. In 1955, Eaton contacted R.S. MacNeish to inform him about the site in Debert. MacNeish, who then served as the chief archaeologist at the National Museum of Canada, recorded the location of the site for further investigation after examining some of the specimens.
E.S. Eaton would later sell his collection of specimens from multiple sites in eastern Canada to a collector from Kentville, Nova Scotia named W.A. Dennis. The collection was later stored at Mt. St.Vincent University following the death of Dennis, who left the collection to the university in his will. After reading Dennis’s note in the American Antiquity, Nova Scotia provincial archaeologist J.S. Erksine visited the site with E.S. Eaton to obtain additional material. The collection was later allocated to the Nova Scotia Museum of Science in Halifax Nova Scotia. [2]
In September 1962, D.S. Byers, the director of the R.S. Peabody Foundation for archaeology in Andover, Massachusetts, conducted a thorough test excavation that revealed undisturbed areas of the deposit. Following the thorough archaeological testing, Byers developed plans for a full scale excavation project in the summer of 1963 and again in the summer of 1964 with a larger group of excavators. These full scale excavations were directed by George Macdonald from the National Museum of Man. [2] The Debert Paleo-Indian site eventually became listed as a National Historic Site of Canada in 1972.
In late autumn of 1989, employees at the Department of Lands and Forests Tree Breeding Center in Debert noticed that their stumping operations could have been disturbing archaeological remains. Archaeologists from the Nova Scotia Museum and Saint Mary’s University checked the area following the concerns expressed about possible disturbance. During this check they discovered two new Paleo-Indian sites, which are now named Belmont I and Belmont II. Further excavations directed by Dr. Stephen Davis of Saint Mary’s University were performed at the new Belmont sites in 1990, where an undisturbed living floor was uncovered along with over 700 artifacts. These testings recovered the first fluted points within a buried context in Nova Scotia since 1964. [1] The majority of artifacts discovered at the Belmont sites were virtually identical to those found at the Debert site, which suggests that the sites had possibly been occupied during the same time period.
Debert is an unincorporated farming community in Nova Scotia, Canada. Located in the central-western part of Colchester County, it is approximately 20 km (12 mi) west of Truro.
The Plano cultures is a name given by archaeologists to a group of disparate hunter-gatherer communities that occupied the Great Plains area of North America during the Paleo-Indian or Archaic period.
Sheguiandah is an archaeological site and National Historic Site of Canada. It is located on the northwestern shore of Manitoulin Island in Manitoulin District, Ontario. The site has remains from 9000 years of occupation, from the Paleo-Indian period through the Archaic period until the Middle Woodland period. Throughout this time, the people of the area travelled to the site to quarry from its quartzite outcroppings for use in toolmaking.
The Paleo-Arctic Tradition is the name given by archaeologists to the cultural tradition of the earliest well-documented human occupants of the North American Arctic, which date from the period 8000–5000 BC. The tradition covers Alaska and expands far into the east, west, and the Southwest Yukon Territory.
The Lindenmeier site is a stratified multi-component archaeological site most famous for its Folsom component. The former Lindenmeier Ranch is in the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, in northeastern Larimer County, Colorado, United States. The site contains the most extensive Folsom culture campsite yet found with calibrated radiocarbon dates of c. 12,300 B.P.. Artifacts were also found from subsequent Archaic and Late pre-historic periods.
J&J Hunt Site (8JE740) is an inundated prehistoric archaeological site located 6 km off the coast of northwestern Florida. The site which was discovered in 1989 is located in 3.7 to 4.6 m of salt water in the Gulf of Mexico along the PaleoAucilla River. In prehistory the site had at least two different occupations: a Late Paleoindian-Early Archaic and Middle Archaic. The J&J Hunt site was a major focus of the PaleoAucilla Prehistory Project conducted by Michael K. Faught.
Gaspereau Lake is a lake in Kings County, Nova Scotia, Canada, about 10 km south of the town of Kentville, Nova Scotia on the South Mountain. It is the largest lake in Kings County, and the fifth largest lake in Nova Scotia. The lake is shallow with dozens of forested islands and hundreds of rocky islets (skerries).
The Marymoor Prehistoric Indian Site is the site of an archaeological dig in Marymoor Park, Redmond, Washington. After King County bought the property in 1962, the site was one of four sites in the park considered for excavation. The dig began in 1964, and continued for four years.
Pendejo Cave is a geological feature and archaeological site located in southern New Mexico about 20 miles east of Orogrande. Archaeologist Richard S. MacNeish claimed that human occupation of the cave pre-dates by tens of thousands of years the Clovis Culture, traditionally believed to be one of the oldest if not the oldest culture in the Americas.
The Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, formerly known as the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, is a learning center and archaeological collection in Andover, Massachusetts. Founded in 1901 through a bequest from Robert Singleton Peabody, 1857 Phillips Academy alumnus, the institute initially held the archaeological materials collected by Peabody from Native American cultures. Peabody's passionate interest in archaeology led him to create the institute at Phillips Academy to encourage young people's interest in the sciences, and to foster respect and appreciation for the Native American peoples who have inhabited that hemisphere for thousands of years.
The Olsen–Chubbuck Bison kill site is a Paleo-Indian site that dates to an estimated 8000–6500 B.C. and provides evidence for bison hunting and using a game drive system, long before the use of the bow and arrow or horses. The site holds a bone bed of nearly 200 bison that were killed, butchered, and consumed by Paleo-Indian hunters. The site is located 16 miles southeast of Kit Carson, Colorado. The site was named after archaeologists, Sigurd Olsen and Gerald Chubbuck, who discovered the bone bed in 1957. In 1958, the excavation of the Olsen-Chubbuck site was then turned over to the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, a team led by Joe Ben Wheat, an anthropologist employed by the museum.
Damjili – is a half-circular shaped cave site in Azerbaijan, where evidence of prehistoric human presence during the Paleolithic and Mesolithic was discovered.
Port au Choix is a peninsula on the western coast of the island of Newfoundland, Canada. Discoveries as early as 1904 provide evidence that native peoples settled here, burials, structural remains, and artifacts such as points, tools, and bones of discarded food.
The Vail site is a prehistoric Native American archaeological site in the remote north of Oxford County, Maine. It is located along an ancient course of the Magalloway River in an area that is occasionally under the waters of the man-made Aziscohos Lake. The site was discovered in 1979, and has been the subject of several archaeological excavations since then. The site includes at least eight encampment areas and a significant kill zone where the Native Americans killed a large number of caribou. A 1-acre (0.40 ha) section of the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980; this listing was enlarged to 7.5 acres (3.0 ha) in 1984.
The Quad site is a series of Paleoindian sites and localities in Limestone County near Decatur, Alabama. It was first reported by Frank Soday in 1954, and later findings were also documented by James Cambron, David Hulse and Joe Wright and Cambron and Hulse. The Quad Locale can seldom be viewed at current lake levels, even during normal winter pool, due to extensive erosion, but is considered one of the most important and well known Paleoindian sites in the Southeastern United States.
At the end of the last Ice Age, Newfoundland and Labrador were covered in thick ice sheets. The province has had a continuous human presence for approximately 5000 years. Although Paleo-Indians are known from Nova Scotia dating back 11,000 years, no sites have been found north of the St. Lawrence. The oldest traces of human activity, in the form of quartz and quartzite knives, were discovered in 1974 in southern Labrador, but some archaeologists have speculated that a human presence may go back as much as 9000 years. Highly acidic soils have destroyed much of the bone and other organic material left behind by early humans and thus complicates archaeological research.
Humans have inhabited Quebec for 11,000 years beginning with the de-glaciated areas of the St. Lawrence River valley and expanding into parts of the Canadian Shield after glaciers retreated 5000 years ago. Quebec has almost universally acidic soils that destroy bone and many other traces of human activity, complicating archaeological research together with development in parts of southern Quebec. Archaeological research only began in earnest in the 1960s and large parts of the province remain poorly researched.
Humans have been present in the Canadian Maritime provinces for 10,600 years. In spite of being the first part of Canada to be settled by Europeans, research into the prehistory of the Maritimes did not become extensive until 1969. By the early 1980s, several full-time archaeologists focused on the region.
The prehistory of New England is an important topic of research for New England archaeologists. Humans reached the current-day New England region by at least 10,500 years ago and likely earlier, occupying a recently de-glaciated environment. Pre-contact Native American groups in New England did not have full-fledged market economies and physical artifacts tended to change very slowly. However, technological shifts brought agriculture and ceramics to the region prior to the arrival of European settlers in the 17th century.
The Fifield Site (Pr-55) is located on Damon Run Creek in Porter County, north-western Indiana. It is classified as a late prehistoric, single-component Upper Mississippian Fisher village.
