Lithic Sourcing of Late Paleoindian Sites in Southeastern Quebec and Links to Vermont

Dr. Adrian Burke, Département d’anthropologie, Université de Montréal This presentation was part of Vermont Archaeology Month 2020; remote Zoom presentation with live Q&A In this talk I will present recent research on the geologic sources of the rocks used to make stone tools at three Late Paleoindian Sites in Southeastern Quebec: Cliche-Rancourt, Gaudreau and Kruger 2. The sites are located in the Eastern Townships or Estrie region of Quebec, close to the Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine borders. The sites are dated primarily by the form of the projectile points found at the sites which are made using a characteristic parallel-flaked technology. While some of the raw materials used come from the region around the site, much of the material used to make the stone tools comes from Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. I present how this can be determined using geoarchaeological methods, and what this tells us about the territories that these Late Paleoindian people occupied and the relationships they had with their neighbors. Adrian L. Burke is professor of archaeology at Université de Montréal. He specializes in the pre-contact archaeology of northeastern North America. His research focuses primarily on lithic technology and more specifically on the raw materials used to make stone tools. He has spent the past 25 years studying the quarries where people extracted the rocks to make stone tools and how these materials were exchanged among Indigenous groups in the past. His most recent fieldwork has been on Saint-Bernard island (Châteauguay, Quebec) where he directed a fieldschool on a site with occupations dating from the Archaic period to the 19th century.