Québec

This outline traces the prehistory of the province of Québec. Technical terms and concepts are avoided but, in attempting to present a general picture, it has been necessary to make the complex appear simple, the poorly known appear well known, and to favour one interpretation when, in fact, several conflicting interpretations exist. Most archaeologists, however, will be in essential agreement with the major themes presented here.

Québec covers an area of 1,356,791 km² within which there are major differences in both the nature of the land and its plant and animal communities. In the north, caribou herds graze on the summer tundra while whale, walrus, seal and polar bears inhabit the coastal waters. Most of the province is covered with evergreen forests spread over Pre-Cambrian rock of the Canadian Shield. Within these sombre forests and myriad of lakes and rivers are found moose, caribou and black bear, beaver and other animals and an abundance of fish such as trout, whitefish and pike. In the south, the mixed hardwood forests grow upon soils deposited by the glaciers or reshaped by the ancient Champlain Sea. The flat to rolling landscape is frequently broken by the massive bedrock remnants of the Appalachians. This region is home to the white-tailed deer, black bear, moose, and a wide variety of smaller animals, fish and birds. In prehistoric times elk, cougar, and the now extinct passenger pigeon also occupied the region. Roughly separating the temperate southern region from the harsh Shield country to the north is the St. Lawrence River, whose lower reaches abounded with whale, porpoise, seal, salmon, eel, capelin, and many other species. Heavy exploitation of most of these species by Europeans beginning in the sixteenth century has markedly reduced their numbers.

Prehistoric peoples had to adapt to this great diversity of landscape, climate, and animal and plant communities. The earliest historic records locate the Inuit (Eskimos) along the province's northern and western coasts, the northern Algonquian speaking hunters in the forests of the Shield as well as along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Iroquoian speaking farmers in the upper St. Lawrence River valley. Eleven thousand years ago early hunters could have penetrated Québec south of the St. Lawrence whereas as late as 5,000 years ago portions of the northern Shield country had just been released by the last remnant of the continental glacier. Subsequent climatic fluctuations have resulted in the shifting of plant communities and their associated animal species, including man. Despite the enormous land mass of the province, the thousands of years of prehistory, and the staggering complexities of attempting to understand the interrelated factors of environmental and cultural change, archaeologists are steadily unravelling the surviving record of the prehistoric peoples of Québec. Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain, Paul Lejeune and other sixteenth and seventeenth century explorers and missionaries made many valuable observations regarding the Native peoples of Québec. What these European observers could never learn, however, was how long ago and from what direction people first occupied the province, when and how the Inuit came to reside in their present location, when and where corn was first grown in the province, and whence it had come. These and a host of other questions can only be answered by archaeologists. As the vast bulk of material evidence consists of such things as broken tools and discarded food bones archaeologists are, to a large extent, glorified collectors and analyzers of prehistoric garbage. Despite these limitations, sufficient information has survived the ravages of time and nature to permit at least partial decipherment of the past. Different prehistoric cultures made stone and bone tools, built houses and buried the dead in different ways. Some were hunters and others were farmers, some made pottery vessels and others did not. These similarities and differences allow the archaeologist to recognize cultural groups and to trace their development through time.

Archaeologists must incorporate elements of knowledge from other disciplines. The biological and earth sciences are particularly important, while physics, chemistry, and other disciplines make direct contributions. The list goes on. Rigorous scientific method, however, is incapable of providing the total means of understanding humanity. Because complex cultural factors have determined the ways people adapted to their surroundings archaeological interpretation must bridge humanism and science.

The Archaeological Regions and Periods of Québec
Period I (10,000 B.C. -- 8,000 B.C.)
Period II (8,000 B.C. -- 4,000 B.C.)
Period III (4,000 B.C. -- 1,000 B.C.)
Period IV (1,000 B.C. -- A.D. 500)
Period V (A.D. 500 -- European Contact)