The Swordfish Hunters: The History and Ecology of an Ancient American Sea People

Thousands of years ago, Maine's Red Paint People, so called because of the red ochre in their burial sites, were among the first maritime cultures in the Americas. They could have subsisted on easily caught cod, but they chose to capture dangerous and elusive swordfish. This book explains beautifully the prehistory of these people, the evolution of archaeological thinking about them, and the myriad new scientific threads that shed new light on this old culture. Anyone with even a passing interest in New England's deep maritime roots must read this book. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, strange objects began to come out of the ground in Hancock County, Maine. They were quickly recognized as prehistoric artifacts of stone, but they were very unlike the spear tips and other small artifacts collectors gathered from coastal sites as they eroded into the sea. Many were large and finely crafted, some made of beautiful stone from far-off places. Strangest of all, they came from pits filled with a brilliant red powder called red ocher. These were ancient graves clustered into large cemeteries. Local naturalists brought these finds to the attention of a new breed of scientist--archaeologists who were busy developing their new science at the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University. They began to visit and to excavate these sites and introduced them to the world in 1893 at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition.