The Maritime Peninsula, the eastern homeland of the Wabanaki, forms a defensible archaeological region, but one divided by an international border. Research from either side of the border remains poorly integrated. In this paper, I consider the history of the institutional-scale research in the region—that is, the organizations supporting, publishing, and regulating archaeological research. Archaeology in the State of Maine developed an outward orientation early on, with research largely sponsored by out-of-state institutions. In contrast, work in the Maritime provinces (Maritimes) was dominated by local natural history societies. A relative dearth of research on both sides of the border for much of the twentieth century served to secure these trends before they were calcified legislatively at the provincial level in the Maritimes and in connection with federal legislation in Maine. As a result, archaeology in the Maritimes is marked in large part by a focus on objects and inventories of objects, a generalist approach that blurs historical and precontact archaeology, and an iterative approach to defining archaeological significance. In contrast, work in Maine tends to emphasize survey and the definition of sites and is more clearly problem oriented with conservative criteria for historical significance. As a result, attempts at regional integration may need to be aimed at some of these scales.
Dr. Howard G. Savage, one of the founders of zooarchaeology in Canada, taught the Faunal Archaeo-Osteology course at the University of Toronto from the 1970s to the 1990s. Hundreds of students completed the course, taking away a solid appreciation of zooarchaeological data generation, representation, and analysis. In this article, we consider why the course had a profoundly positive influence on so many students and examine how Dr. Savage’s legacy lives on in zooarchaeology in Ontario. We then interrogate the appropriateness of transferring lessons of an undergraduate course into professional approaches and find that this transferring has indirectly resulted in an arbitrary and insufficiently large sample size appearing in government guidelines for professional archaeologists. Similarly, practices that were deemed appropriate in a university course context, such as a tendency to not identify fish vertebrae, have carried over into professional standards and practice and have resulted in biased zooarchaeological datasets. We argue that accepted practices within zooarchaeology in the province need to be revised and strengthened.
The refutation of Charles Abbott’s 1872 claim of having recovered Paleolithic artifacts in the Trenton Gravels is a key event in the early history of North American archaeology—with particularly important implications for the archaeology of the Northeast. This article re-examines the historical record, along with a portion of the Abbott Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum (Penn Museum), to argue that the case against Abbott was flawed. Thus, rather than a triumph of scientific rigour over the bumbling of an amateur, the triumph of William Henry Holmes over Abbott was more an expression of the dynamics of the emerging academic discipline of archaeology.
