Letter from Newfoundland: Homing in on the Red Paint People by Angela M.H. Schuster -- More than 5,000 years ago, this barren, sea-lashed coast was home to the Maritime Archaic Indians (MAI), who hunted and fished the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland for more than 2,000 years. The first evidence of the Maritime Archaic culture was discovered more than 30 years ago when James A. Tuck of Memorial University of Newfoundland excavated 56 elaborate burials exposed during housing construction on a small promontory at Port au Choix, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence just south of the Strait of Belle Isle. Buried between 4400 and 3300 B.P., the dead -- along with offerings of tools, animal bones, carved animal effigies, and small, white quartz pebbles -- were covered in red ochre, earning them the moniker the "Red Paint People." Tool kits contained woodworking implements for building dwellings and watercraft; finely wrought bone and ivory fishhooks, harpoons, and harpoon heads, bone foreshafts; and long, narrow ground slate lances for hunting whale and walrus; and fragments of fish spears, all of which pointed to a lifeway dependent on the deep sea.
Priscilla Renouf points to 5,500-year-old archaeological features. (Angela M.H. Schuster)
