The Infertile Crescent Revisited: A Case (Study) for the History of Archaeology

This paper examines the history of archaeological research concerning the eastern coast of James Bay in northern Quebec. The construction of prehistory in northern Quebec began with the earliest contact of Europeans with Native Canadians and developed from religious explanations to Classical Evolutionary ones to Culture-Historical ones to Neoevolutionary scientific ones. Although the theoretical interpretations changed over time, the content remained surprisingly constant. The challenges of research in the area, and the resulting paucity of data, led to generalizations that telescoped thousands of years and eight million square miles into a single interpretation, based largely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century assumptions about hunter-gatherer mobility, subsistence and social evolution. This paper traces how these assumptions have affected the archaeology of the twentieth century in James Bay and northern Quebec.