Posted on 07/16/2023 8:42:47 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Lost Red Paint People | 55:12
The Land of Façade | 199 subscribers | 1,407 views | April 25, 2023
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Transcript 0:01 · foreign [Music] 0:14 · the northern Atlantic Coast is a remote and Barren land 0:20 · locked in ice for much of the year and surrounded by bitterly cold Seas 0:25 · [Music] 0:35 · it is almost unimaginable that ancient peoples could have survived in this 0:40 · desolate region [Music] but a series of archaeological discoveries in the United States and 0:47 · Canada has uncovered startling new evidence that a previously unknown culture more 0:54 · advanced than anyone had believed possible flourished here near the edge of the Arctic Circle many thousands of 1:00 · years ago the discovery of this early civilization 1:06 · is changing our vision of ancient North America and challenging long-held 1:11 · assumptions about the development of Native American culture 1:18 · foreign begins just over a century ago with an 1:25 · accidental discovery on the coast of Maine it gradually unfolds into one of the 1:30 · great quests of American archeology the search for the lost red paint people 1:47 · in 1882 Augustus Hamlin the mayor of Bangor Maine was guided to a region near 1:53 · the mouth of the Penobscot River by Foster super a local farmer Soper had told the mayor about a place 2:00 · where blood colored pools were rising out of the Earth 2:06 · Hamlin was a doctor and a geologist but he was also an amateur Anthropologist a so-called antiquarian 2:14 · who believed in theories about the past that scientists would later consider implausible 2:22 · this part of the main Coast had generated Legends for hundreds of years as far back as the 16th century European 2:29 · explorers had recorded an Indian myth about a fabled place called norumbega 2:34 · which they interpreted to be a city overflowing with riches 2:40 · [Music] this map of 1569 placed Norm Vega near 2:47 · the mouth of the Penobscot River Hamlin had searched but he never found a trace 2:53 · of a lost city [Music] 2:58 · he did find accounts of unexplained Stone ruins discovered by the settlers who first cleared the dense forest along 3:04 · the Penobscot River like other antiquarians of his time Hamlin believed that these were the 3:11 · ruins of structures built by Europeans who arrived in the New World before Columbus he suggested that they might be the 3:18 · remains of Finland The Lost Colony of the Vikings [Music] 3:32 · the stone ruins of the Northeast were not the only archaeological Mysteries which interested the antiquarians 3:39 · there were also hundreds of prehistoric mounds and Earthworks like these located in the Ohio Valley 3:46 · as early as the 1700s amateur scientists had been digging up these mysterious 3:52 · man-made Hills and discovering the spectacular remains of an ancient culture 3:58 · these elaborate burials and artifacts indicated that the mound builders were more advanced than the known Indian 4:04 · tribes of the region 19th century antiquarians explained this by developing The Theory of A Lost 4:11 · Civilization which existed in America before the Indian and then mysteriously 4:18 · vanished the earliest Mounds were simple circular 4:24 · forms but later examples evolved into precise geometric designs built on a vast scale 4:33 · the geometry and surveying skills needed to construct these ritual Landscapes seemed to be unknown among the Native 4:40 · Americans because they were ancient Mounds 4:46 · throughout Europe other Scholars who did not believe in the theory of lost races suggested that the American Mounds were 4:52 · built by colonists from a more highly developed cultures of the old world they believed in the theory of diffusion 4:59 · that early voyagers brought the mound building tradition across the Atlantic 5:05 · eventually both of these antiquarian theories would be abandoned as the new discipline of scientific archeology 5:12 · developed by the mid-20th century professional anthropologists would firmly deny that 5:18 · ancient people navigated across the ocean and they would dismiss as well the idea of lost races 5:26 · but here in the landscape forming the heart of the old norambega myth Hamlin the antiquarian was about to make a 5:33 · discovery which would eventually change scientific beliefs though its real significance was not 5:39 · understood for a hundred years what he found here was the first evidence of a completely unknown ancient race of 5:47 · skilled seafaring people who once lived along the Atlantic coast 5:58 · as a geologist Hamlin realized he was looking at a high grade of red ocher iron oxide 6:08 · the ocher had been turned up by the plow and the red pools were formed when it mixed with a night rain 6:16 · buried in the ocher Hamlin found artifacts made of polished Stone 6:23 · he knew that Native American peoples used red ocher for war paint and for their rituals but what surprised him was 6:31 · the quality and the Perfection of the polished artifacts the stone woodworking tools were honed 6:37 · to a sharpness rivaling a metal blade and they were far superior to the artifacts found at Indian sites in Maine 6:45 · Hamlin brought the tools to the Peabody Museum at Harvard and the search for the mysterious red paint people was taken up 6:52 · by professional archaeologist Charles C Willoughby 6:57 · when Willoughby investigated Hamlin's site he discovered a mound at the water's edge and began a dig that has 7:03 · been called the first scientific excavation in America willoughby's careful measurements and 7:09 · drawings revealed that the artifacts had been buried in ritual patterns he suspected that they were the remains 7:16 · of ancient Graves but he found no skeletons to confirm his theory 7:21 · he suggested that the graves were so old that the bones had long ago disintegrated in the acidic New England 7:27 · soil he built this scale model to be displayed at the 1893 world's Colombian 7:33 · exhibition in Chicago [Music] along with Willoughby another 7:39 · archaeologist was presenting his work in the Hall of anthropology Warren K Moorhead became famous when he 7:46 · displayed his discoveries of the Ohio mound builder treasure at the exhibition he was a self-taught archaeologist who's 7:53 · less than careful excavation Methods made him a Maverick in the profession's eye 7:58 · but his uncanny nose for spectacular discoveries made his name a household word 8:05 · Moorhead was searching for the origins of the mound builders and he soon became interested in willoughby's site in Maine 8:13 · with a team of excavators he called the force Moorhead set out on an expedition 8:18 · up the rivers of Maine to investigate willoughby's claims of boneless cemeteries 8:26 · these recently discovered hand-tinted glass slides were used to illustrate his 8:31 · popular lectures when Moorhead got involved in Maine 8:38 · archeology he elevated the Quest for the red paint people to high adventure 8:43 · foreign Moorhead was impressed by the quality of 8:48 · the tools the workmanship of the polished Stone led him to believe that the red paint 8:54 · people had a highly evolved culture he sent examples back to museums in the 9:00 · midwest to be shown alongside the artifacts of the mountain builders 9:05 · by the turn of the century he had excavated several mounds and ritual sites both in the hills and along the 9:11 · coast of Maine Moorhead wrote that in all his explorations he had never examined sites 9:17 · appearing so old but like Willoughby he never found a skeleton or a village 9:23 · without this evidence there was no way to determine who these people were how they lived or where they came from 9:31 · but he did note that some of the tools were made from a type of stone not found anywhere in Maine or New England 9:39 · Moore had daringly suggested that its source would someday be located in the far north and he claimed this was 9:45 · evidence of long-distance trade his prediction was born out 80 years 9:51 · later when archaeologists discovered the source of this unusual stone in Rama Bay 9:56 · Northern Labrador 1500 nautical miles from the coast of Maine 10:03 · the stone is now called Rama chert it's beautiful translucence and sugary 10:09 · texture make it highly distinctive [Music] the church has been found in artifact 10:16 · collections as far south as New Jersey and West along the Saint Lawrence River into Vermont 10:22 · the Rama Bay Quarry was the only place in the world where this type of church could be found 10:27 · confirming moorhead's idea of a link between the red paints and the far north 10:33 · at the time moorhead's academic colleagues considered his claims to be too Sensational 10:39 · some simply dismissed the idea of an advanced prehistoric culture and others 10:44 · thought that the red paints actually might have been a group of marauding Eskimo from the north 10:49 · eventually moorhead's career was destroyed 10:57 · not surprisingly the next generation of professional anthropologists avoided the question and the Mystery of the red 11:04 · paint culture was temporarily forgotten 11:09 · it was not until the 1930s that another major Discovery occurred in Maine 11:15 · this one was found by chance under an Indian shell Heap on the edge of Blue Hill Bay 11:21 · these heaps are the discarded remains of shellfish built up by generations of tribes who returned year after year to 11:28 · harvest the ocean creatures they have been found in many places along the Atlantic coast 11:34 · on Blue Hill Bay red ocher began eroding from the bottom of a heap known as the Nevin site 11:42 · it was brought to the attention of archaeologist Douglas Byers 11:47 · the layers of crushed shell formed a calcium-rich mixture that neutralized the acidic soil 11:54 · at the bottom buyers found the badly disintegrated remains of full skeletons 11:59 · covered in red ocher just as Moorhead and Willoughby had predicted 12:05 · buyers also found bone artifacts with surprisingly beautiful decorations engraved into the surface 12:13 · no one had expected to find such precise geometric designs among the red paints 12:19 · but the most surprising discoveries at the Nevin site were toggling harpoons and the remains of swordfish a deep 12:27 · water ocean species these artifacts were the first clue that the red paint people might be a 12:33 · seafaring race 12:39 · of American apology resisted this idea there seemed to be no historical 12:45 · evidence for ocean navigation among the Indians but then the next major red paint 12:51 · discovery in Maine occurred on a remote island in Penobscot Bay in the late 1960s Dr Bruce bork of the 12:59 · Maine State Museum investigated a shell Heap on North Haven island near the bottom he found the remains of a red 13:05 · paint Fishing Station well ten years ago we didn't really understand much about the lifestyle of 13:12 · the people who left these cemeteries then in 1971 I began excavations at the 13:18 · Turner Farm site and got down near the bottom of this deep shell Heap to a series of strata that related to a 13:26 · village of what I call the Moorhead phase people who left these cemeteries 13:31 · Dr bork and his crew had a tool which had been unavailable to early archaeologists they used radiocarbon 13:38 · dating to determine that the red paint occupation of the island occurred over four thousand years ago 13:45 · this surprisingly early date indicated that the red paint culture predated the mound builder civilizations of the 13:52 · Midwest by more than 2 000 years and we were surprised to find 13:58 · that most of the bone or great deal of the bone related to Maritime activity 14:05 · specifically cod fish was very abundant and and very surprisingly swordfish was 14:11 · tremendously abundant now both these animals swordfish and cod fish are deep water animals 14:20 · people of the Moorhead phase were very skilled at going out and and traveling the several miles 14:26 · necessary to get to the ideal hunting and fishing places for these two species 14:33 · which are so prominent in the red paint Graves suggest to us a great Skillet working 14:38 · wood and when you combine the evidence we have here for dependence on deep water marine species with a parent 14:46 · importance or skill in woodworking the sense then is that these people were Maritime Hunters who made very competent 14:55 · sea craft the boats that these people use were seaworthy they were rugged probably large dog canoes perhaps not 15:01 · too different from those we know from the northwest coast during the historic period 15:07 · the sea peoples of the Pacific Northwest have recently become a model to help anthropologists visualize the way of 15:14 · life of the red paint people this rare footage of Northwest Coast Indians was produced at the turn of the 15:20 · century by photographer Edward Curtis 15:27 · Curtis worked with equal people and the famous Indian ethnographer George hunt 15:32 · to build and photograph examples of their traditional boats and houses 15:42 · thank you here George hunt demonstrates the woodworking tools of the northwest coast 15:48 · that are similar in shape and function to the tools found in the red paint burials of Maine 15:54 · although the red paints predated these northwest coast people by thousands of years the similarity of their tools 16:01 · suggests how advanced the red paint culture must have been This Island village located 200 miles 16:08 · off the coast of British Columbia was abandoned a century ago and has already 16:13 · begun to disintegrate if these wooden structures had been built four thousand years ago by now 16:19 · they would have disappeared Without a Trace like the sea peoples of the Pacific Northwest the red paint people of the 16:27 · Northeast built their Villages at the water's edge unfortunately for archaeologists the 16:33 · edge of the ocean is one of the most abrasive environments known and there is very little left of the red paint way of 16:39 · life 16:46 · at the same time as Dr bork's work in Maine there was an accidental Discovery at the edge of an island in the Canadian 16:52 · maritimes is a fishing community in Northwestern Newfoundland 16:57 · in 1968 construction began for a new movie theater on the outskirts of town 17:03 · a bulldozer cut through a patch of red ocher and the work was stopped as Dr James tuck from Memorial University and 17:10 · St John's was called in 17:16 · I came up to see the question it was something that we'd been looking for for 17:21 · a long time because it's apparently the remains of a 17:27 · burial cult that we're interested in finally archaeologists had found 17:33 · skeletons which were preserved well enough to identify enabling Dr tuck to give the red paint 17:38 · people a new scientific name the maritime archaic 17:43 · eventually it turned out to be a site that I guess people had been looking for for a hundred years there were red paint 17:49 · cemeteries in Maine but almost never had there been any bone preserved when we first found the human bones we asked 17:56 · ourselves questions like are these people Eskimos or or were they Indians it sounds almost silly now 15 years 18:02 · later but those were questions that were very real and important then Jim Anderson a physical Anthropologist 18:09 · who studied the bones immediately after they'd come from the field was able to distinguish that these people were in 18:14 · fact racially American Indians North American Indians rather than Europeans or Eskimos I think the European question 18:22 · is is hardly important at all doesn't bear discussing but there are biological traits in the skulls and else and 18:30 · intracranial skeletons of these people that allow physical anthropologists to distinguish between people we recognize 18:36 · as Eskimos and those we'd recognize as Indians the site proved to be over 4 000 years 18:43 · old about the same age as the sites in Maine when I first saw them I couldn't believe 18:48 · they were as old as they were the preservation was almost beyond belief they looked fresh and new and covered 18:55 · with red ocher when we completed our analysis of the port of soil material we had for the 19:01 · first time a real good look at the sophisticated sea mammal hunting technology or sea hunting technology 19:07 · that these people had their weapons included toggling harpoons and Barbed harpoons 19:14 · these were used to Harpoon sea mammals the polished slate and Bone Lance points 19:19 · were probably used to dispatch sea mammals seals and walrus and so forth there were specialized fish Spears 19:27 · things called leisters and a very sophisticated and well-developed 19:33 · technology for exploiting the resources of the Gulf of St Lawrence I think that the analogy is probably 19:39 · pretty good between East and West so they certainly had a boating technology of which we know a great deal on the 19:46 · west coast but very little here because of preservation you get the impression though from 19:51 · looking at the collections from both areas that British Columbia material is much more 19:57 · Rich say in terms of wood technology I bet though if you found the maritime 20:02 · archaic site with the same kind of preservation as you find in British Columbia it'd really be a surprise knock 20:08 · your socks off some of the stuff they had if the Native American cultures of the 20:15 · northwest coast are any guide the spiritual beliefs of the maritime archaic were shaped by powerful forces 20:22 · in the natural environment anthropologists use the term Shamanism 20:27 · to describe the religion of hunting cultures around the northern globe Shamanism is not so much a formalized 20:33 · religion but a way of relating to the spirits of nature to the shaman each particular object 20:40 · animal and place has a spiritual identity and the shaman communicates with these forces through a State of 20:46 · Trance often experienced alone in the wilderness 20:52 · this altered state of consciousness is brought on by starvation physical exertion or psychoactive substances 21:00 · the ritual is often accompanied by drumming chanting and dancing the shaman gains intuition and uses it 21:07 · to guide the community curing illness and ensuring success in hunting and War 21:13 · these spiritual techniques have existed for thousands of years and have been documented into modern times this 16th 21:20 · century European print of a sorcerer in a trance was one of the first visual records of native life on the Atlantic 21:26 · coast 400 years later Anthropologist Franz Boaz documented a similar event when he 21:32 · filmed this northwest coast Shaman for his study of ritual gestures [Music] 21:39 · Edward Curtis in his filmwork dramatized the Shaman's ritual with the help of George hunt he 21:46 · recreated a sacred place in the wilderness the Indian selects the skulls of certain 21:52 · ancestors who will share in the experience the dancing May last a few hours or a 21:58 · few days but it is followed by a trance-like sleep in which the shaman speaks with the spirits of the natural 22:04 · world at some point in history that natural world and its spiritual realm expanded 22:11 · when people began to communicate with the animal spirits of the sea 22:17 · a good example of that might be the killer whale Effigy that was found on the chest of a young adult male it's 22:24 · it's probably speculation but we know that others see mammal Hunters have had killer whale cults 22:30 · why not the people at puertoire communication with the spirits of the 22:36 · sea was a major step for these ancient cultures which had been dominated by land Spirits for countless millennia 22:44 · the recognition of these new and Powerful spiritual forces released people from their bondage to the land 22:50 · and opened up a wider world of Maritime travel and trade 22:55 · for these traditional cultures we can imagine that navigation was a ritual where the shaman pilot consulted the 23:02 · winds the waves the animals and the Stars 23:10 · along with the whales several artifacts from the burials at Porter schwa indicate that water birds were also 23:15 · important to the maritime archaic the birds habits and migration patterns 23:21 · would have been especially important for piloting and navigation the image of the water bird here carved 23:27 · on a comb was a common motif Dr tuck also found burials covered with 23:32 · the beaks of a species known as the great awk these flightless penguin-like birds once 23:39 · traveled in huge flocks which swam across the ocean from their home in Iceland to the shores of North America 23:46 · they spread out in a mass which extended from miles across the surface of the ocean as they moved slowly along their 23:53 · migration route from labradora to the Carolinas the species was so easy for Sailors to 23:59 · hunt that it became extinct in 1844 perhaps by following the slow-moving Ox 24:06 · the maritime archaic first explored the remote shores of Northern Labrador 24:27 · Dr William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian institution has himself been exploring 24:32 · the coast of Labrador searching for the northern limits of the maritime archaic 24:37 · if remains of the red paint people could be found here it would confirm that the maritime archaic were skilled 24:44 · long-distance Navigators in 1980 on the desolate beaches of nuliac Cove Dr 24:51 · fitzhu found what it eluded every other researcher for a hundred years the remains of red paint house 24:58 · foundations newly Act is the largest settlement location that we have found and I expect 25:05 · it's very near the northern limit of this culture 25:11 · the reason that they were able to live so far north in a area that's pretty 25:16 · harsh with very rigorous Winters an ice cover on the sea for eight months of the year at least is because of a very 25:23 · intensive Maritime adaptation it's a type of adaptation which probably 25:28 · extended with variations into New England but yet there was a homogeneity to the style of Life a kind of a 25:36 · similarity certainly in the ceremonial cultures to some extent an artifact forms which bound this entire area of 25:43 · the Northeast all the way from North of the forest Fringe down into the temperate zones 25:48 · and it's a been a puzzle for archaeologists because they could not 25:54 · understand the complexity the burial ceremonialism the rather elaborate artifact types 26:00 · in terms of a northern typical Northern Indian way of life something 26:06 · characterized by Algonquin Culture by Montana Scotty Indians and the Indians 26:11 · we know ethnographically from this area who traveled in small bands who hunted 26:16 · uh Caribou but never got into this intense kind of Life which we see 26:22 · indicated by the maritime archaic foreign 26:38 · off the hills up here and they tend to follow each other frequently so that there's a trail which 26:44 · develops you can see beaten into the ground here and these things will last for a long long time you'll get 26:51 · projectile points primarily and broken frequently in this case here we've found 26:57 · one that's right in the Caribou Trail just as it's dropped for four thousand years it's been right there 27:03 · and I don't know how many Caribou have ever stepped on that but certainly more than one the Smithsonian crew began by Excavating 27:11 · a small Stone Mound which was the first clue that the red paint people had occupied the site 27:20 · but probably extends up out of the pit over here weighs 27:27 · the archaeological team set up their Camp below the Beach Terrace where the maritime archaic had once lived 27:34 · the ancient settlement was preserved because geological forces raised the beach away from the Ocean's erosive Edge 27:41 · thousands of years ago thank you when the melting Glacier receded from 27:47 · the ocean at the end of the last ice age perhaps ten thousand years ago a river channel was formed 27:53 · relieved from the great weight of the ice the landmass rose out of the sea and a beach developed at the mouth of the 27:59 · channel at some point after the maritime archaic first settled on the beach continued 28:05 · geological uplift raised the Terrace above sea level and the channel was blocked forming a pond 28:10 · [Music] scientists now had their first chance to 28:16 · see how the maritime archaic lived before the Discovery at newly act practically everything known about the 28:22 · red paint culture had been learned from their burials of the Dead the first place where people could live 28:29 · was up on the side of the pond where they raised Beaches come down from the 28:35 · hillside to the level of the pond when we first visited the site I was 28:40 · attracted by a number of Boulder lines features in the earth which can be seen here 28:46 · uh they're roughly two parallel raised ridges of beach stones 28:52 · about two meters apart stretching away from us and they seem to be unnatural not the 28:59 · normal kind of geological features which would form as a Beech Ridge and when we started looking at these 29:05 · things we began finding evidence of human activity in in throughout the 29:10 · interior of these two Boulder lines and such things as flakes of 29:17 · Ramen shirt uh pieces of slate with a bulb of 29:23 · percussion where they've been snapped off the original block [Applause] fragments of artifacts like the stem 29:30 · from a maritime archaic stem point and one of the problems we have is the 29:36 · the shape and size of this particular feature now the probability is that these raised 29:43 · ridges isolate living areas within this house we can see as we come down the 29:49 · inside of the structure ridges here 29:54 · here and two more till we get to the the end 30:00 · the Smithsonian crew found the remains of 26 multi-roomed structures some 30:07 · measuring 90 meters in length the radiocarbon dates indicate that over 30:12 · 4 000 years ago large groups of people were living in well-organized communities here at the edge of the 30:18 · Arctic along the front of the ancient Beach 30:23 · Terrace the Smithsonian crew also began to excavate a foundation that was near a 30:29 · mysterious upright Stone 30:36 · this is a typical deposit containing firecrack Rock 30:41 · chips of amateur fragments of tool making activity pieces 30:47 · of broken tools that have been burned in the fire charcoal Flex red ocher 30:54 · this whole arrangement of artifacts is a little interesting because of this big Stone here which may have been a 31:01 · structural feature of the house or a seat or have served some other purpose but it is interesting that the material 31:08 · is is distributed in a cluster around this this large Rock 31:15 · [Music] like the small standing Stone Dr fitzhu found on the beach at nuliac there are 31:22 · other Stone monuments in Labrador that also remain an archaeological mystery 31:28 · bound primarily along the coast these Stone Pinnacles may have had both a spiritual and a practical purpose 31:39 · some are single slabs propped into vertical position and others are Cairns built up with 31:45 · smaller boulders [Music] the Eskimo refer to these monuments as 31:52 · anukshuks their Traditions say that the stone markers point the way to settlements 31:58 · boat Pilots can navigate along the coast by using a simple technique of alignments and angles to identify their 32:04 · positions offshore these basic principles of geometry may 32:10 · have been developed thousands of years ago by the first cultures adapting to the Sea 32:16 · the technique is still useful today especially in the far north where Modern navigational instruments are not always 32:22 · trustworthy [Music] 32:30 · here we have a grinding slab of some sort probably for polishing ground slate 32:36 · axes and gouges implements such as stemmed projectile 32:41 · points and knives they had a whole variety of stem points from large to small perhaps some for 32:48 · hunting birds others for sea mammals and in addition a very distinctive artifact 32:55 · uh soapstone plummets which are found in large numbers in southern Labrador 33:01 · Maritime archaic sites and seem to be restricted to the 4 000 year old time period 33:07 · plummets have often been found in red paint burials and they were probably used as fishing weights but the smallest 33:14 · examples are often beautifully crafted sometimes decorated and may have been used for other purposes 33:21 · this engraved pendant from nuliac is a rare discovery a complex geometric design along with 33:28 · other markings indicate a high level of intellectual development among the maritime archaic over 4 000 years ago 33:36 · [Music] 33:45 · has encouraged fresh comparisons with the ancient sea peoples of Northern Europe 33:54 · the shores of Scandinavia have supported Maritime cultures for thousands of years this fact has been recognized by 34:01 · European archaeologists for decades in Norway Professor Paul siemensen of 34:06 · the Tromso museum has studied the remains of cultures that once lived above the Arctic Circle 34:12 · at the very beginning of human habitation after the Ice Age up here 34:17 · people came along the coast simply because the whole of the Inland still 34:22 · were coward by the ash sheets it's impossible to imagine people 34:29 · walking up along the Norwegian Coast because of the fjords and because of the 34:34 · ice so it's absolutely necessary that they had a boat and were in some way adapted 34:44 · to the Sea like the house Foundations at newly act the remains of these Stone Age dwellings 34:51 · at barangar Fjord were also raised above the present Shoreline by geological forces 34:57 · the site was discovered in the 1930s and Professor siemensen began his excavation 35:03 · of the structures in the early 1950s on some Dwelling Places you have fish 35:10 · bones of deep sea fishes and on the same places you have very large and heavy 35:15 · sinking Stones meaning that they could fish up to perhaps 100 120 meters deep 35:23 · in North America use of the plummet vanished with the mound builders but in 35:28 · Europe it evolved as a Mariner's tool this 16th century print shows how the 35:33 · weight attached to a line was used to determine the water's depth eventually the plummet became a basic 35:40 · element of navigational and astronomical instruments along with the sea hunting equipment 35:45 · Professor siemensen's crew also recovered beautiful tools made out of polished slate 35:51 · during the excavations of the 30s Norwegian Anthropologist gutorm yessing was the first to recognize that the 35:58 · tools were very similar to examples from North America he wrote nowhere on the globe are there 36:04 · to be found remains as closely related as those of Norway and the coast of Maine 36:11 · during World War II yessing retreated to his office to work on a theory suggesting that these cultural 36:18 · developments spread in the far north by diffusion foreign 36:24 · tools led yessing to believe that there had once been a single circumpolar culture that originated in central 36:30 · Russia and diffused across the land masses to the coasts of Europe and the Eastern shores of North America 36:37 · because you must remember that he was a devoted divisionists 36:45 · a man who sought that one thing can only be invented one time and from there this 36:53 · place spread out over 37:00 · if people living one in New England and the other in Norway made two things 37:06 · quite alike we are inclined to say they had had invented them independent 37:14 · but if people are living very near each hour and then are making things quite alike we say that one must have learned 37:21 · it from the other but we don't know for sure 37:27 · more important than tools yessing identified what he believed to be deeper connections between the spiritual 37:33 · beliefs in both hemispheres for example this engraved bone from 37:38 · Norway has a geometric design created by mapping out an alignment of dots and then connecting them to form a straight 37:45 · line this same technique of aligned dots was also used to engrave the decorations on 37:51 · the bone daggers found at the Nevin site on the coast of Maine 37:57 · these traits which are very very alike are not only traits for practical 38:04 · purpose but they are ornamentation they are patterns they are spiritual things 38:15 · along with the artwork yessing carefully studied the spiritual traditions of Northern cultures 38:21 · this archival footage of a Lapis Shaman was filmed in the Norwegian Arctic it shows a ritual involving a standing 38:29 · Stone which may be thousands of years old [Music] 38:41 · yesing understood that similar tool shapes might be coincidence but he believed the deep-rooted 38:47 · shamanistic Traditions so similar around the globe could only have been the result of diffusion 38:54 · [Music] at first yessing's theory of land 39:01 · diffusion was widely hailed by his colleagues it seemed to finally explain the 39:06 · extraordinary similarities which existed among the circumpolar cultures but appealing as the theory was there 39:13 · was no proof to back it up during the 1950s archaeologists working 39:20 · in central Russia and western Canada could not find any evidence that a circumpolar culture had diffused across 39:25 · the central land masses eventually his theory was put on the top 39:30 · shelf to collect dust but yessing never gave up his idea of land diffusion according to Professor siemensen yessing 39:38 · never considered the possibility that ancient peoples could have been skilled Mariners 39:43 · I have never seen the word Malaysian adaptation in his papers I don't think 39:49 · that just this perspective was a part of his acting Concepts 39:57 · to me that still is a lot of sense in his 40:03 · theories I'll not speak about the circumpolar Stone Age I'll not speak about a 40:08 · circumpola culture at all but a sir compola connections and Communications 40:16 · from People to People surely exist and some cultural traits 40:23 · will be transmitted over very very long East-West distances in the Arctic 40:30 · [Music] like the trade patterns along the coast 40:35 · of North America there were extensive networks which linked the people of Norway with others see adapted cultures 40:41 · to the South artifacts have been found in Norway that were manufactured here on the coast of 40:47 · Denmark in 1975 at a site called vedberg 40:53 · archaeologists from the Danish national museum discovered the remains of a sea adapted culture that was once part of 40:59 · this Trade Network thousands of years ago there was a channel where these yellow flowers now 41:06 · bloom on the Hills that surrounded the water they discovered 19 burials 41:14 · neocarbon dates indicated that the graves were over 7 000 years old 41:20 · three thousand years older than the maritime archaic sites found in North America 41:28 · some of the burials may have been ritual sacrifices this woman wore a large necklace of 41:33 · teeth to her grave a small child perhaps her own was placed at her side 41:39 · [Music] when the woman and child were first discovered they were covered with red 41:45 · ocher a round polished Stone lay near the woman's fractured skull 41:51 · and a knife blade rested at the midsection of the infant in all these areas we find the Red Oak 42:00 · that of course has been opened a lot of speculation what what the meaning of the 42:05 · Red Oak how that would be understood 42:10 · the use of red ocher goes back at least 75 000 years into early Neanderthal times but the existence of red ocher 42:17 · cemeteries is especially prominent among sea going peoples like the maritime archaic burials in 42:24 · North America the red ocher cemeteries of Europe are found along the shore in 1927 here on the island of tebiak 42:31 · just off the coast of Brittany French archaeologists Martin Sanchez pequart 42:36 · discovered red paint burials near the bottom of a shell Heap like veg the teviac cemetery proved to 42:43 · be over 7 000 years old and the burial rituals were similar but what was unusual about teviac was 42:51 · that several of the burials had been placed in small stone structures beneath the shell Mounds 42:57 · the piccarts believed that these might have been early examples of the mysterious Stone megaliths left 43:02 · throughout northern Europe and the British Isles by an unknown ancient people 43:08 · the megalith Builders of Europe like the mound builders of America were often considered a lost Race by 19th century 43:15 · antiquarians the picwords suggested that the red paint people of teviac were the 43:20 · ancestors of the megalith builders at the time their idea was considered too radical most anthropologists believe 43:26 · that the chambered mounds and alignments of Standing Stones had been built by Neolithic farming peoples of a much more 43:32 · recent time period but further north along the rocky coasts of Western Sweden conditions made it 43:39 · necessary for the ancient inhabitants to live primarily by fishing not farming 43:47 · Cambridge University archaeologist Graham Clark has studied these ancient Maritime peoples his research also 43:53 · suggests that the early megalith Builders were a sea-going culture and it's interesting that among quite a 44:01 · number of maritime sedentary dwellers 44:06 · we find the appearance of quite elaborate tombs 44:12 · something which until recently we'd always thought of as being a special 44:17 · feature of Neolithic man IL thick and later societies 44:23 · for example we have a stone cans in the maritime archaic context 44:30 · oh Labrador dating from several thousand years before Christ 44:36 · [Applause] one of the first things that attracted 44:42 · me to this site was the boulder constructions in a roughly circular arrangement 44:48 · this uh was suspected as a burial and we've now opened up the center of the 44:54 · burial feature revealing a pit about two meters in diameter filled with dark humus stained 45:02 · Earth flakes of ramen shirt bits of mica and other signs of cultural activity 45:08 · it's ocher stain a little bit of ocher stain down here you can be beginning to get down onto the bottom 45:14 · so I suspect maybe we get down below this layer of slabs we might we might come down on top of the the feature have 45:21 · there been any uh flakes or charcoals or anything like that there's flakes mixed 45:27 · in the burial fill but no charcoal yet so how much deeper 45:33 · good luck boy and over here east side of the mound there is a 45:41 · [Applause] Crypt of some sort uh chamber built out of stones 45:47 · in a rather unusual way for maritime archaic culture we've never seen anything like this before it is very 45:54 · unusual in this lintel Stone on top of these carefully chosen Flat Rocks 46:00 · and of course it's um an interesting fact that if you plot the distribution of 46:07 · magnificent terms on a map you will find a large proportion of them on or very 46:12 · close to the coast this in the past was interpreted in 46:18 · terms of diffusion which is equally possible that such magnetic structures were built by people 46:26 · whose economy was based fundamentally on fishing not on farming 46:35 · just as antiquarians once believed that the stone ruins in America came from the old world 46:40 · anthropologists also once believed that the megalithic tradition in Europe spread by diffusion from the Middle East 46:48 · for antiquarians and scientists alike the stone ruins along the Atlantic coast have remained a provocative problem in 46:54 · human prehistory but Professor Clark's work suggests that a new understanding of these early Maritime cultures may 47:02 · offer answers in the future over seven thousand years ago these 47:07 · early sea-going people may have been the first highly evolved civilization to inhabit the European Coast 47:14 · across the Atlantic where the awareness of an ancient Maritime culture along the northeast coast is a brand new idea 47:21 · the phenomenon of the red paint people may also help to explain the antiquarian mysteries of the new world 47:29 · as researchers discover more about the maritime archaic they are beginning to realize that these early sea peoples may 47:35 · have left a legacy with far-ranging effects on the development of Indian cultures in the Northeast 47:42 · scientists are unsure of where the maritime archaic tradition began but the 47:47 · earliest evidence has been found here on the coast of Labrador when the French fishermen settled here 47:54 · in the 17th century they named this Bay lancamort the Bay of death 47:59 · the name gradually changed to Lance Amour the Bay of love 48:05 · ironically the primary attraction of Lancer more today is this burial mound 48:11 · excavated by Dr James tuck and Professor Robert McGee the site proved to be one of the most important Maritime archaic 48:17 · discoveries in North America when we first came we saw only a corner of it that had been exposed by this road 48:24 · construction and subsequent erosion we excavated the mound in quadrants and 48:30 · in near the center there was a rectangular Stone cyst made of upright Stones we were a little disappointed 48:37 · because there was no skeleton or any artifacts in there a little bit of red ocher but 48:43 · when we dug below the cyst just to make sure there was nothing there we were really surprised to find the skeleton of 48:49 · a child about 12 or 13 years old buried face down head to the West we don't know 48:55 · it was a male or female because it was too young to be able to tell it's an unusual burial especially for so 49:02 · much time and effort and expense to have been lavished on a young child 49:08 · it might be that these are not quite so much or not entirely for the disposal of the 49:14 · dead but represent as well renewal rights for the community holding the 49:20 · the community together a large flat Rock lay across the burial 49:25 · and ritual fires had been set due north and south the charcoal samples were radiocarbon 49:31 · dated to about 7 500 years ago making this the earliest known Maritime archaic 49:38 · burial site in North America the almost identical dates in both Europe and America were a surprise to 49:45 · scientists previous theories about cultural development from the antiquarians to yessing were based on 49:52 · the assumption that diffusion had to originate among the more advanced races of Europe 49:58 · but this new evidence suggests that cultural development may have been parallel on both sides of the Atlantic 50:04 · over seven thousand years ago the evidence also compels diffusionists to 50:09 · ask whether these ancient ceremonial Traditions were once carried from North 50:15 · America to the shores of Europe along the prevailing Northern route of the Gulf Stream 50:21 · the Lancer more burial is also an important clue to the mystery of the mound builders in North America 50:27 · it predates the Mounds of the Midwest by more than five thousand years I suppose you could consider this the 50:34 · start of a mound tradition in the new world this burial and the ones at brador 50:39 · and elsewhere are more than seven thousand years old I think therefore that the they're the 50:45 · oldest burial mounds certainly in this part of the world maybe in most of North America 50:51 · the artifacts themselves included toggling Harpoon of a design we've never 50:57 · seen before since and since it's 7 500 years old it's if not the oldest one of 51:03 · the oldest toggling harpoons that's ever been found so these guys were pretty sophisticated sea mantle Hunters 51:11 · from the time of Lance Amore the red paint people flourished for about four thousand more years 51:17 · then without explanation the traces of their culture vanish from the archaeological record 51:23 · most of the artifacts we have seen were never intended for our eyes but of all their Remains the most intriguing are 51:29 · those which they wanted us to see the ritual monuments they left in the Landscapes of the Northeast 51:36 · Dr Fitzhugh believes that these ancient people the first to live on these subarctic coasts have left us a glimpse 51:43 · of an early ritual tradition as it appeared in the New World one of the interesting features of the 51:50 · maritime archaic in Labrador at least is the association between ceremonial sites 51:56 · burial sites and eminence imminent prominent locations and it seemed as though people were selecting these 52:03 · locations for qualities of the land high hills sweeping Vistas magnificent 52:10 · scenery as well as conditions that were suitable for Excavating burials Sandy Terraces and things like that 52:17 · the early Maritime archaic Mounds seemed to be individual structures with single burials in them on these prominent 52:24 · locations they're always at the front of The Terraces very near the sea very near the 52:29 · most sweeping Panorama that you can get the ballet Brack situation is probably 52:36 · the most dramatic I've seen but we have located a maybe 10 or 12 Maritime 52:41 · archaic burial areas and all of them have these characteristics they're not putting the ceremonial sites back in 52:48 · under the hills hiding them away it's as though the individual is buried you know wanted to be placed in such a position 52:55 · so that he could see out across the sea and I think the people were interested 53:00 · in this kind of a concept of beauty and Landscape mixed with mountains and 53:06 · waterfalls and everything else there's a lot of that in Labrador but the sites 53:11 · that they choose to live in are really rather special that way you don't find that with other cultures either with the 53:17 · Eskimo cultures or the other Indian cultures 53:23 · the discovery of the maritime archaic represents one of the rare instances when antiquarian mystery and scientific 53:30 · exploration have merged together they have revealed an unknown chapter in the ancient history of North 53:37 · America [Music] 54:01 · foreign 54:10 · [Music] 54:37 · [Applause] 54:51 · thank you 55:12 · thank you
PBS Nova - History Documentary - Secrets of the Lost Red Paint People | 55:18
AbsolutelyAnything | 126 subscribers | 6,390 views | February 4, 2023
Transcript 0:00 · who were the mysterious people that buried their dead in these Mounds 2500 years ago no real answers have ever been 0:07 · found recent discoveries on the coasts of Maine and Labrador are providing Clues could there be a link between the 0:14 · ancient megaliths of Europe the red paint burials of the Northeast and the mound builders of the Midwest 0:20 · can scientists unravel the secrets of the lost red paint people 0:36 · oh 0:42 · the northern Atlantic Coast is a remote and Barren land 0:47 · locked in ice for much of the year and surrounded by bitterly cold Seas 0:55 · [Music] 1:03 · it is almost unimaginable that ancient peoples could have survived in this 1:08 · desolate region but a series of archaeological discoveries in the United States and 1:15 · Canada has uncovered startling new evidence that a previously unknown culture more 1:22 · advanced than anyone had believed possible flourished here near the edge of the Arctic Circle many thousands of 1:27 · years ago the discovery of this early civilization 1:33 · is changing our vision of ancient North America and challenging long-held assumptions 1:39 · about the development of Native American culture 1:45 · foreign begins just over a century ago with an 1:52 · accidental discovery on the coast of Maine it gradually unfolds into one of the 1:58 · great quests of American archeology the search for the lost red paint people 2:10 · [Music] in 1882 Augustus Hamlin the mayor of 2:18 · Bangor Maine was guided to a region near the mouth of the Penobscot River by Foster super a local farmer 2:25 · Soper had told the mayor about a place where blood colored pools were rising out of the Earth 2:34 · Hamlin was a doctor and a geologist but he was also an amateur anthropologist 2:40 · a so-called antiquarian who believed in theories about the past that scientists 2:45 · would later consider implausible this part of the main Coast had 2:51 · generated Legends for hundreds of years as far back as the 16th century European 2:57 · explorers had recorded an Indian myth about a fabled place called norumbeka which they interpreted to be a city 3:04 · overflowing with riches [Music] 3:12 · this map of 1569 placed Norm Vega near the mouth of the Penobscot River Hamlin 3:18 · had searched but he never found a trace of a lost city 3:26 · he did find accounts of unexplained Stone ruins discovered by the settlers who first cleared the dense forest along 3:32 · the Penobscot River like other antiquarians of his time Hamlin believed that these were the 3:39 · ruins of structures built by Europeans who arrived in the New World before Columbus he suggested that they might be 3:46 · the remains of Finland The Lost Colony of the Vikings [Music] 3:59 · the stone ruins of the Northeast were not the only archaeological Mysteries which interested the antiquarians 4:07 · there were also hundreds of prehistoric mounds and Earthworks like these located in the Ohio Valley 4:14 · as early as the 1700s amateur scientists had been digging up these mysterious 4:19 · man-made Hills and discovering the spectacular remains of an ancient culture 4:25 · these elaborate burials and artifacts indicated that the mound builders were more advanced than the known Indian 4:32 · tribes of the region 19th century antiquarians explained this 4:37 · by developing The Theory of A Lost Civilization which existed in America before the Indian and then mysteriously 4:45 · vanished the earliest Mounds were simple circular 4:51 · forms but later examples evolved into precise geometric designs built on a vast scale 5:01 · the geometry and surveying skills needed to construct these ritual Landscapes seemed to be unknown among the Native 5:07 · Americans [Music] because there were ancient Mounds 5:14 · throughout Europe other Scholars who did not believe in the theory of lost races suggested that the American Mounds were 5:20 · built by colonists from a more highly developed cultures of the old world they believed in the theory of diffusion 5:27 · that early voyagers brought the mound building tradition across the Atlantic 5:33 · eventually both of these antiquarian theories would be abandoned as the new discipline of scientific archeology 5:39 · developed by the mid-20th century professional anthropologists would firmly deny that 5:46 · ancient people navigated across the ocean and they would dismiss as well the idea of lost races 5:54 · but here in the landscape forming the heart of the old norambega myth Hamlin the antiquarian was about to make a 6:01 · discovery which would eventually change scientific beliefs though its real significance was not 6:07 · understood for a hundred years what he found here was the first evidence of a completely unknown ancient race of 6:14 · skilled seafaring people who once lived along the Atlantic coast 6:26 · as a geologist Hamlin realized he was looking at a high grade of red ocher iron oxide 6:36 · the ocher had been turned up by the plow and the red pools were formed when it mixed with a night rain 6:43 · buried in the ocher Hamlin found artifacts made of polished Stone 6:51 · he knew that Native American peoples used red ocher for war paint and for their rituals 6:57 · but what surprised him was the quality and the Perfection of the polished artifacts 7:02 · the stone woodworking tools were honed to a sharpness rivaling a metal blade and they were far superior to the 7:09 · artifacts found at Indian sites in Maine Hamlin brought the tools to the Peabody 7:15 · Museum at Harvard and the search for the mysterious red paint people was taken up by professional archaeologist Charles C 7:22 · Willoughby when Willoughby investigated Hamlin's 7:27 · site he discovered a mound at the water's edge and began a dig that has been called the first scientific 7:33 · excavation in America willoughby's careful measurements and drawings revealed that the artifacts had 7:39 · been buried in ritual patterns he suspected that they were the remains of ancient Graves but he found no 7:46 · skeletons to confirm his theory he suggested that the graves were so old 7:51 · that the bones had long ago disintegrated in the acidic New England soil 7:56 · he built this scale model to be displayed at the 1893 world's Colombian exhibition in Chicago 8:02 · [Music] along with Willoughby another archaeologist was presenting his work in 8:09 · the Hall of anthropology Warren K Moorhead became famous when he 8:14 · displayed his discoveries of the Ohio mound builder treasure at the exhibition he was a self-taught archaeologist who's 8:21 · less than careful excavation Methods made him a Maverick in the profession's eye 8:26 · but his uncanny nose for spectacular discoveries made his name a household word 8:33 · Moorhead was searching for the origins of the mound builders and he soon became interested in willoughby's site in Maine 8:40 · with a team of excavators he called the force Moorhead set out on an expedition 8:45 · up the rivers of Maine to investigate willoughby's claims of boneless cemeteries 8:54 · these recently discovered hand-tinted glass slides were used to illustrate his 8:59 · popular lectures when Moorhead got involved in Maine 9:05 · archeology he elevated the Quest for the red paint people to high adventure 9:13 · like Hamlin Moorhead was impressed by the quality of the tools 9:18 · the workmanship of the polished Stone led him to believe that the red paint people had a highly evolved culture 9:25 · he sent examples back to museums in the midwest to be shown alongside the artifacts of the mound builders 9:32 · by the turn of the century he had excavated several mounds and ritual sites both in the hills and along the 9:39 · coast of Maine Moorhead wrote that in all his explorations he had never examined sites 9:45 · appearing so old but like Willoughby he never found a skeleton or a village 9:50 · without this evidence there was no way to determine who these people were how they lived or where they came from 9:59 · but he did note that some of the tools were made from a type of stone not found anywhere in Maine or New England 10:06 · Moore had daringly suggested that its source would someday be located in the far north and he claimed this was 10:13 · evidence of long-distance trade his prediction was borne out 80 years 10:18 · later when archaeologists discovered the source of this unusual stone in Rama Bay 10:23 · Northern Labrador 1500 nautical miles from the coast of Maine 10:31 · the stone is now called Rama Church beautiful translucence and sugary 10:37 · texture make it highly distinctive [Music] the church has been found in artifact 10:44 · collections as far south as New Jersey and West along the Saint Lawrence River into Vermont 10:49 · the Rama Bay Quarry was the only place in the world where this type of church could be found 10:55 · firming moorhead's idea of a link between the red paints and the far north 11:00 · at the time moorhead's academic colleagues considered his claims to be too Sensational 11:06 · some simply dismissed the idea of an advanced prehistoric culture and others 11:12 · thought that the red paints actually might have been a group of marauding Eskimo from the north 11:17 · eventually moorehead's career was destroyed 11:25 · not surprisingly the next generation of professional anthropologists avoided the question and the Mystery of the red 11:32 · paint culture was temporarily forgotten 11:37 · it was not until the 1930s that another major Discovery occurred in Maine 11:43 · this one was found by chance under an Indian shell Heap on the edge of Blue Hill Bay 11:49 · these heaps are the discarded remains of shellfish built up by generations of tribes who returned year after year to 11:56 · harvest the ocean creatures they have been found in many places along the Atlantic coast 12:02 · on Blue Hill Bay red ocher began eroding from the bottom of a heap known as the Nevin site 12:10 · it was brought to the attention of archaeologist Douglas Byers 12:15 · the layers of crushed shell formed a calcium-rich mixture that neutralized the acidic soil 12:21 · at the bottom buyers found the badly disintegrated remains of full skeletons 12:27 · covered in red ocher just as Moorhead and Willoughby had predicted 12:33 · buyers also found bone artifacts with surprisingly beautiful decorations engraved into the surface 12:40 · no one had expected to find such precise geometric designs among the red paints 12:47 · but the most surprising discoveries at the Nevin site were toggling harpoons and the remains of swordfish a deep 12:54 · water ocean species these artifacts were the first clue that the red paint people might be a 13:00 · seafaring race 13:08 · an apology resisted this idea there seemed to be no historical evidence for ocean navigation among the Indians 13:16 · but then the next major red paint discovery in Maine occurred on a remote island in Penobscot Bay 13:23 · in the late 1960s Dr Bruce bork of the Maine State Museum investigated a show Heap on North Haven island near the 13:31 · bottom he found the remains of a red paint Fishing Station well 10 years ago we didn't really 13:37 · understand much about the lifestyle of the people who left these cemeteries 13:43 · then in 1971 I began excavations at the Turner Farm site and got down near the 13:49 · bottom of this deep shell Heap to a series of strata that related to a village of what I call the Moorhead 13:55 · phase people who left these cemeteries Dr bork and his crew had a tool which 14:01 · had been unavailable to early archaeologists they used radiocarbon dating to determine that the red paint 14:08 · occupation of the island occurred over 4 000 years ago 14:13 · this surprisingly early date indicated that the red paint culture predated the mound builder civilizations of the 14:19 · Midwest by more than 2 000 years and we were surprised to find 14:26 · that most of the bone or great deal of the bone related to Maritime activity 14:33 · specifically cod fish was very abundant and and very surprisingly swordfish was 14:39 · tremendously abundant now both these animals swordfish and cod fish are deep water animals 14:47 · the people of the Moorhead phase were very skilled at going out and traveling 14:53 · the several miles necessary to get to the ideal hunting and fishing places for these two species 14:59 · the gouges which are so prominent in the red paint Graves suggest to us a great skill at working 15:06 · wood and when you combine the evidence we have here for dependence on deep water marine species with the apparent 15:14 · importance or skill in woodworking but since then is that these people were Maritime Hunters who made 15:21 · very competent sea craft boats that these people use were seaworthy they 15:26 · were rugged they're probably large Dugout canoes perhaps not too different from those we know from the northwest 15:31 · coast during the historic period the sea peoples of the Pacific Northwest 15:36 · have recently become a model to help anthropologists visualize the way of life of the red paint people this rare 15:44 · footage of Northwest Coast Indians was produced at the turn of the century by photographer Edward Curtis 15:51 · [Music] Curtis worked with a coagul people and 15:58 · the famous Indian ethnographer George hunt to build and photograph examples of their traditional boats and houses 16:05 · foreign 16:11 · here George hunt demonstrates the woodworking tools of the northwest coast that are similar in shape and function 16:18 · to the tools found in the red paint burials of Maine although the red paints predated these 16:24 · northwest coast people by thousands of years the similarity of their tools suggests how advanced the red paint 16:30 · culture must have been This Island village located 200 miles off the coast of British Columbia was 16:38 · abandoned a century ago and has already begun to disintegrate if these wooden structures had been 16:44 · built four thousand years ago by now they would have disappeared Without a Trace 16:50 · like the sea peoples of the Pacific Northwest the red paint people of the Northeast built their Villages at the 16:56 · water's edge unfortunately for archaeologists the edge of the ocean is one of the most 17:02 · abrasive environments known and there is very little left of the red paint way of life 17:09 · [Music] at the same time as Dr bork's work in 17:16 · Maine there was an accidental Discovery at the edge of an island in the Canadian maritimes 17:21 · is a fishing community in Northwestern Newfoundland in 1968 construction began for a new 17:28 · movie theater on the outskirts of town a bulldozer cut through a patch of red ocher and the work was stopped as Dr 17:35 · James tuck from Memorial University in St John's was called in 17:43 · I came up to see the what had been found it was something that we'd been looking for for a long time because it's 17:51 · apparently the remains of a burial cult that we're interested in 17:58 · finally archaeologists had found skeletons which were preserved well enough to identify 18:03 · enabling Dr tuck to give the red paint people a new scientific name the maritime archaic 18:11 · eventually it turned out to be a site that I guess people had been looking for for 100 years there were red paint 18:17 · cemeteries in Maine but almost never had there been any bone preserved that when we first found the human bones we asked 18:24 · ourselves questions like are these people Eskimos or or were they Indians it sounds almost silly now 15 years 18:29 · later but those were questions that were very real and important then uh Jim Anderson a physical 18:36 · Anthropologist who studied the bones immediately after they'd come from the field was able to distinguish that these 18:41 · people were in fact racially American Indians North American Indians rather than Europeans or Eskimos I think the 18:48 · European question is is hardly important at all doesn't bear discussing but there 18:54 · are biological traits in the skulls and else and intracranial skeletons are these people that allow physical 19:00 · anthropologists to distinguish between people we recognize as Eskimos and those we'd recognize as Indians 19:08 · the site proved to be over 4 000 years old about the same age as the sites in 19:13 · Maine when I first saw them I couldn't believe they were as old as they were the preservation was almost beyond belief 19:20 · they looked fresh and new and covered with red ocher when we completed our analysis of the 19:27 · port of soil material we had for the first time a real good look at the sophisticated sea mammal hunting 19:33 · technology or sea hunting technology that these people had their weapons included 19:38 · toggling harpoons and Barbed harpoons these were used to Harpoon sea mammals 19:45 · the polished slate and Bone Lance points were probably used to dispatch seam animals seals and walrus and so forth 19:52 · there were specialized fish Spears things called leisters and a very 19:58 · sophisticated and well-developed technology for exploiting the resources of the Gulf of St Lawrence 20:04 · I think that the analogy is probably pretty good between East and West they 20:09 · certainly had a boating technology of which we know a great deal on the west coast but very little here because of 20:15 · preservation uh you get the impression though from looking at the collections from both 20:21 · areas that British Columbia material is much more Rich say in terms of wood technology I 20:28 · bet though if you found the maritime archaic site with the same kind of preservation as you find in British 20:33 · Columbia really be a surprise knock your socks off some of the stuff they had 20:40 · if the Native American cultures of the northwest coast are any guide the spiritual beliefs of the maritime 20:46 · archaic were shaped by powerful forces in the natural environment 20:52 · anthropologists use the term Shamanism to describe the religion of hunting cultures around the northern globe 20:58 · Shamanism is not so much a formalized religion but a way of relating to the spirits of nature 21:05 · to the shaman each particular object animal and place has a spiritual 21:10 · identity and the shaman communicates with these forces through a State of Trance often experienced alone in the 21:16 · wilderness this altered state of consciousness is 21:22 · brought on by starvation physical exertion or psychoactive substances the ritual is often accompanied by 21:29 · drumming chanting and dancing the shaman gains intuition and uses it 21:34 · to guide the community curing illness and ensuring success in hunting and War 21:40 · these spiritual techniques have existed for thousands of years and have been documented into modern times this 16th 21:47 · century European print of a sorcerer in a trance was one of the first visual records of native life on the Atlantic 21:53 · coast 400 years later Anthropologist Franz Boaz documented a similar event when he 22:00 · filmed this northwest coast Shaman for his study of ritual gestures 22:07 · Edward Curtis in his filmwork dramatized the Shaman's ritual with the help of George hunt he 22:13 · recreated a sacred place in the wilderness the Indians selects the skulls of 22:19 · certain ancestors who will share in the experience the dancing May last a few hours or a 22:26 · few days but it is followed by a trance-like sleep in which the shaman speaks with the spirits of the natural 22:31 · world at some point in history that natural world and its spiritual realm expanded 22:39 · when people began to communicate with the animal spirits of the sea 22:44 · a good example of that might be the killer whale Effigy that was found on the chest of a young adult male 22:51 · it's it's probably speculation but we know that others see mammal Hunters have had killer whale cults 22:58 · why not the people at portisois communication with the spirits of the 23:04 · sea was a major step for these ancient cultures which had been dominated by land Spirits for countless millennia 23:11 · the recognition of these new and Powerful spiritual forces released people from their bondage to the land 23:18 · and opened up a wider world of Maritime travel and trade 23:23 · for these traditional cultures we can imagine that navigation was a ritual where the shaman pilot consulted the 23:30 · winds the waves the animals and the Stars 23:37 · along with the whales several artifacts from the burials at Porter schwa indicate that water birds were also 23:43 · important to the maritime archaic the birds habits and migration patterns 23:48 · would have been especially important for piloting and navigation the image of the water bird here carved 23:54 · on a comb was a common motif Dr tuck also found burials covered with 24:00 · the beaks of a species known as the great Ark these flightless penguin-like birds once 24:07 · traveled in huge flocks which swam across the ocean from their home in Iceland to the shores of North America 24:14 · they spread out in a mass which extended from miles across the surface of the ocean as they moved slowly along their 24:20 · migration route from Labrador to the Carolinas the species was so easy for Sailors to 24:27 · hunt that it became extinct in 1844 perhaps by following the slow-moving Ox 24:34 · the maritime archaic first explored the remote shores of Northern Labrador [Music] 24:54 · Dr William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian institution has himself been exploring 24:59 · the coast of Labrador searching for the northern limits of the maritime archaic foreign 25:06 · people could be found here it would confirm that the maritime archaic were 25:11 · skilled long-distance Navigators in 1980 on the desolate beaches of nubiak Cove 25:18 · Dr fitzhu found what it eluded every other researcher for a hundred years the 25:24 · remains of red paint house foundations newly Act is the largest settlement 25:30 · location that we have found and I expect it's very near the northern limit of 25:35 · this culture the reason that they were able to live 25:41 · so far north in a area that's pretty harsh with very rigorous Winters and ice cover on the sea for eight months of the 25:48 · year at least is because of a very intensive Maritime adaptation it's a type of adaptation which probably 25:55 · extended with variations into New England but yet there was a homogeneity to the style of Life a kind of a 26:03 · similarity certainly in the ceremonial cultures to some extent an artifact forms which bound this entire area of 26:10 · the Northeast all the way from North of the forest Fringe down into the temperate zones 26:16 · and it's a been a puzzle for archaeologists because they could not 26:21 · understand the complexity the burial ceremonialism the rather elaborate artifact types 26:28 · in terms of a northern typical Northern Indian way of life something 26:33 · characterized by Algonquin Culture by Montana Scotty Indians and the Indians 26:38 · we know ethnographically from this area who traveled in small bands who hunted 26:43 · uh Caribou but never got into this intense kind of Life which we see 26:49 · indicated by the maritime archaic foreign 26:55 · [Music] 27:05 · off the hills up here and they tend to follow each other frequently so that there's a trail which develops you can 27:13 · see beaten into the ground here and these things will last for a long long time you'll get 27:19 · projectile points primarily and broken frequently in this case here we've found 27:25 · one that's right in the Caribou Trail just as it's dropped for four thousand years it's been right there 27:31 · and I don't know how many Caribou have ever stepped on that but certainly more than one the Smithsonian crew began by Excavating 27:38 · a small Stone Mound which was the first clue that the red paint people had occupied the site 27:46 · generally it's found right in the bottom of the deposit but probably extends up out of the pit over here ways 27:55 · the archaeological team set up their Camp below the Beach Terrace where the maritime archaic had once lived 28:02 · the ancient settlement was preserved because geological forces raised the beach away from the Ocean's erosive Edge 28:08 · thousands of years ago [Music] when the melting Glacier receded from 28:15 · the ocean at the end of the last ice age perhaps 10 000 years ago a river channel was formed 28:21 · relieved from the great weight of the ice the land mass rose out of the sea and a beach developed at the mouth of 28:27 · the channel at some point after the maritime archaic first settled on the beach continued 28:33 · geological uplift raised the Terrace above sea level and the channel was blocked forming a pond 28:42 · scientists now had their first chance to see how the maritime archaic lived before the Discovery at newly act 28:48 · practically everything known about the red paint culture had been learned from their burials of the Dead 28:54 · the first place where people could live was up on the side of the pond where 29:00 · they raised Beaches come down from the hillside to the level of the pond 29:05 · when we first visited the site I was attracted by a number of Boulder lines 29:11 · features in the earth which can be seen here uh they're roughly two parallel raised 29:18 · ridges of beach stones about two meters apart stretching away 29:23 · from us and they seem to be unnatural not the normal kind of geological features which 29:28 · would form as a Beech Ridge and when we started looking at these things we began finding evidence of 29:35 · human activity in in throughout the interior of these two Boulder lines 29:40 · and such things as flakes of around my shirt 29:47 · uh pieces of slate with a bulb of percussion where they've been snapped 29:52 · off the original block fragments of artifacts like the stem 29:57 · from a maritime archaic stem point and one of the problems we have is the 30:03 · the shape and size of this particular feature now the probability is that these raised 30:11 · ridges isolate living areas within this house we can see as we come down the 30:16 · inside of the structure ridges here here 30:23 · and two more until we get to the the end 30:29 · the Smithsonian crew found the remains of 26 multi-roomed structures some 30:34 · measuring 90 meters in length the radiocarbon dates indicate that over 4 000 years ago large groups of people 30:42 · were living in well-organized communities here at the edge of the Arctic 30:49 · along the front of the ancient Beach Terrace the Smithsonian crew also began to excavate a foundation that was near a 30:56 · mysterious upright Stone 31:03 · this is a typical deposit containing firecrack Rock chips of ramen shirt 31:11 · fragments of tool making activity pieces of broken tools that have been burned in 31:17 · the fire charcoal Flex red ocher this whole arrangement of artifacts is a 31:24 · little interesting because of this big Stone here which may have been a structural feature of the house or a 31:31 · seat or have served some other purpose but it is interesting that the material is is distributed in a cluster around 31:39 · this this large Rock [Music] 31:45 · like the small standing Stone Dr fitzhu found on the beach at nuliac there are 31:50 · other Stone monuments in Labrador that also remain an archaeological mystery 31:56 · found primarily along the coast these Stone Pinnacles may have had both a spiritual and a practical purpose 32:05 · [Music] some are single slabs propped into vertical position 32:11 · and others are Cairns built up with smaller boulders 32:17 · the Eskimo referred to these monuments as anuchshoks their Traditions say that the stone 32:23 · markers point the way to settlements Pilots can navigate along the coast by 32:28 · using a simple technique of alignments and angles to identify their positions offshore 32:36 · basic principles of geometry may have been developed thousands of years ago by the first cultures adapting to the Sea 32:44 · the technique is still useful today especially in the far north where Modern navigational instruments are not always 32:50 · trustworthy 32:57 · here we have a grinding slab of some sort probably for polishing ground slate 33:03 · axes and gouges implements such as stemmed projectile 33:09 · points and knives they had a whole variety of stem points from large to small perhaps some for 33:16 · hunting birds others for sea mammals and in addition a very distinctive artifact 33:23 · soapstone plummets which are found in large numbers in southern Labrador 33:29 · Maritime archaic sites and seem to be restricted to the 4 000 year old time period 33:35 · plummets have often been found in red paint burials and they were probably used as fishing weights but the smallest 33:41 · examples are often beautifully crafted sometimes decorated and may have been used for other purposes 33:48 · this engraved pendant from noeliac is a rare discovery a complex geometric design along with 33:55 · other markings indicate a high level of intellectual development among the maritime archaic over four thousand 34:01 · years ago [Music] 34:08 · discovery of this Advanced sea culture living in North America has encouraged 34:14 · fresh comparisons with the ancient sea peoples of Northern Europe 34:21 · the shores of Scandinavia have supported Maritime cultures for thousands of years this fact has been recognized by 34:28 · European archaeologists for decades in Norway Professor Paul siemensen of 34:34 · the Tromso museum has studied the remains of cultures that once lived above the Arctic Circle at the very 34:40 · beginning of human habitation after the Ice Age up here people came along the 34:47 · coast simply because the whole of the Inland still were caught by the ice sheets 34:54 · it's impossible to imagine people walking up along the Norwegian Coast 34:59 · because of the fjords and because of the ice so it's absolutely necessary that they 35:06 · had a boat and were in some way adapted 35:11 · to the Sea like the house Foundations at newly act the remains of these Stone Age dwellings 35:18 · at barangar cured were also raised above the present Shoreline by geological forces 35:25 · the site was discovered in the 1930s and Professor siemensen began his excavation 35:30 · of the structures in the early 1950s some Dwelling Places you have fish bones 35:37 · of deep sea fishes and on the same places you have very large and heavy 35:43 · sinking Stones meaning that they could fish up to perhaps 100 120 meter deep 35:51 · in North America use of the plummet vanished with the mound builders but in Europe it evolved as a Mariner's tool 35:59 · this 16th century print shows how the weight attached to a line was used to determine the water's depth 36:05 · eventually the plummet became a basic element of navigational and astronomical instruments 36:11 · along with the sea hunting equipment Professor siemensen's crew also recovered beautiful tools made out of 36:17 · polished slate during the excavations of the 30s Norwegian Anthropologist gutorm yessing 36:24 · was the first to recognize that the tools were very similar to examples from North America 36:29 · he wrote nowhere on the globe are there to be found remains as closely related 36:34 · as those of Norway and the coast of Maine during World War II yesing retreated to 36:42 · his office to work on a theory suggesting that these cultural developments spread in the far north by 36:48 · diffusion the similar tools led yessing to believe 36:53 · that there had once been a single circumpolar culture that originated in central Russia and diffused across the 37:00 · land masses to the coasts of Europe and the Eastern shores of North America because you must remember that he was a 37:10 · devoted divisionists a man who sought that one thing can only 37:17 · be invented one time and from the this place spread out over 37:27 · if people living one in New England and the other in Norway made two things 37:33 · quite alike we are inclined to say they had had 37:38 · invented them independent but if people are living very near each 37:44 · other and then are making things quite alike we say that one must have learned it from the other but we don't know for 37:52 · sure more important than tools using 37:57 · identified what he believed to be deeper connections between the spiritual beliefs in both hemispheres 38:03 · for example this engraved bone from Norway has a geometric design created by 38:09 · mapping out an alignment of dots and then connecting them to form a straight line 38:14 · this same technique of aligned dots was also used to engrave the decorations on the bone daggers found at the Nevin site 38:21 · on the coast of Maine these traits which are very very alike 38:29 · are not only traits for practical purpose they are ornamentation they are patterns 38:36 · they are spiritual things [Music] 38:42 · along with the artwork essing carefully studied the spiritual traditions of Northern cultures 38:49 · this archival footage of a Lapis Shaman was filmed in the Norwegian Arctic 38:54 · it shows a ritual involving a standing Stone which may be thousands of years old 39:01 · [Music] 39:09 · yesing understood that similar tool shapes might be coincidence but he believed the deep-rooted 39:15 · shamanistic Traditions so similar around the globe could only have been the result of diffusion 39:21 · [Music] at first yessing's theory of land 39:28 · diffusion was widely hailed by his colleagues it seemed to finally explain the 39:34 · extraordinary similarities which existed among the circumpolar cultures but appealing as the theory was there 39:41 · was no proof to back it up during the 1950s archaeologists working 39:47 · in central Russia and western Canada could not find any evidence that a circumpolar culture had diffused across 39:53 · the central land masses eventually his theory was put on the top 39:58 · shelf to collect dust but yessing never gave up his idea of land diffusion according to Professor siemensen yessing 40:05 · never considered the possibility that ancient peoples could have been skilled Mariners 40:11 · I have never seen the word a matter team adaptation in his papers 40:16 · I don't think that just this perspective was a part of his active Concepts 40:25 · to me there still is a lot of sense in his 40:30 · theories I'll not speak about the second polar Stone Age I will not speak about a 40:36 · circumpola culture at all but a circumpola connections and 40:43 · Communications from People to People surely exist and some 40:49 · cultural traits will be transmitted over very very long East-West distances in 40:56 · the Arctic [Music] like the trade patterns along the coast 41:02 · of North America there were extensive networks which linked the people of Norway with others see adapted cultures 41:09 · to the South artifacts have been found in Norway that were manufactured here on the coast of 41:15 · Denmark in 1975 at a site called vetbake 41:20 · archaeologists from the Danish national museum discovered the remains of a sea adapted culture that was once part of 41:27 · this Trade Network thousands of years ago there was a channel where these yellow flowers now 41:33 · bloom on the Hills that surrounded the water they discovered 19 burials 41:39 · [Music] carbon dates indicated that the graves 41:45 · were over 7 000 years old three thousand years older than the maritime archaic sites found in North 41:51 · America [Music] the burials may have been ritual 41:57 · sacrifices this woman wore a large necklace of teeth to her grave 42:02 · a small child perhaps her own was placed at her side 42:09 · when the woman and child were first discovered they were covered with red ocher 42:14 · a round polished Stone lay near the woman's fractured skull and a knife blade rested at the 42:20 · midsection of the infant in all these 30s we find the red ocher 42:27 · that of course has been open to a lot of speculation what what the meaning of the 42:33 · red ocean how that would be understood 42:38 · the use of red ocher goes back at least 75 000 years into early Neanderthal times but the existence of red ocher 42:45 · cemeteries is especially prominent among sea going peoples like the maritime archaic burials in 42:51 · North America the red ocher cemeteries of Europe are found along the shore in 1927 here on the island of tebiak 42:59 · just off the coast of Brittany French archaeologists Martin Sanchez pequart 43:04 · discovered red paint burials near the bottom of a shell Heap like veg the teviac cemetery proved to 43:11 · be over 7 000 years old and the burial rituals were similar but what was unusual about teviac was 43:19 · that several of the burials had been placed in small stone structures beneath the shell Mounds 43:24 · the piccarts believed that these might have been early examples of the mysterious Stone megaliths left 43:30 · throughout northern Europe and the British Isles by an unknown ancient people 43:35 · the megalith Builders of Europe like the mound builders of America were often considered a lost Race by 19th century 43:42 · antiquarians the pink warts suggested that the red paint people of teviac were the ancestors of the megalith builders 43:49 · at the time their idea was considered too radical most anthropologists believe 43:54 · that the chambered mounds and alignments of Standing Stones had been built by Neolithic farming peoples of a much more 44:00 · recent time period but further north along the rocky coasts of Western Sweden conditions made it 44:07 · necessary for the ancient inhabitants to live primarily by fishing not farming 44:14 · Cambridge University archaeologist Graham Clark has studied these ancient Maritime peoples his research also 44:21 · suggests that the early megalith Builders were a sea-going culture and it's interesting that among quite a 44:29 · number of Maritime sedentary dwellers 44:34 · we find the appearance of quite elaborate tombs 44:39 · something which until recently we'd always thought of as being a special 44:45 · feature of nearly hit man music and later societies 44:51 · for example we have a stone cans in the maritime archaic context 44:58 · oh Labrador dating from several thousand years before Christ 45:07 · one of the first things that attracted me to the site was the boulder constructions in a roughly circular 45:14 · arrangement this uh was suspected as a burial and 45:19 · we've now opened up the center of the burial feature revealing a pit about two meters in 45:26 · diameter filled with dark humous stained Earth flakes of ramen shirt bits of mica 45:33 · and other signs of cultural activity you know this ocher stain a little bit of ocher stain down here you can be 45:39 · getting to get down onto the bottom so I suspect maybe we get down below this 45:44 · layer of slabs we might we might come down on top of the the feature have there been any uh flights or charcoals 45:51 · or anything like that there's flakes mixed in the burial fill but no charcoal yeah 45:58 · so how much deeper good luck boy I don't know 46:03 · and over here on the east side of the mound there is a 46:09 · Crypt of some sort uh chamber built out of stones 46:15 · in a rather unusual way for maritime archaic culture we've never seen anything like this before it is very 46:21 · unusual in this lintel Stone on top of these carefully chosen Flat Rocks 46:27 · and of course it's an interesting fact that if you plot the distribution of 46:34 · magnificent tombs on a map you will find a large proportion of them armor over 46:40 · the coast to the coast this in the past was interpreted in 46:45 · terms of diffusion whether it is equally possible that such magnetic status were built by people 46:53 · whose economy was faced fundamentally on fishing not on farming 47:02 · just as antiquarians once believed that the stone ruins in America came from the old world 47:08 · anthropologists also once believed that the megalithic tradition in Europe spread by diffusion from the Middle East 47:15 · for antiquarians and scientists alike the stone ruins along the Atlantic coast have remained a provocative problem in 47:22 · human prehistory but Professor Clark's work suggests that a new understanding of these early Maritime cultures may 47:29 · offer answers in the future over 7 000 years ago these early 47:34 · sea-going people may have been the first highly evolved civilization to inhabit the European Coast 47:42 · across the Atlantic where the awareness of an ancient Maritime culture along the northeast coast is a brand new idea 47:49 · the phenomenon of the red paint people may also help to explain the antiquarian mysteries of the new world 47:56 · as researchers discover more about the maritime archaic they are beginning to realize that these early sea peoples may 48:03 · have left a legacy with far-ranging effects on the development of Indian cultures in the Northeast 48:10 · scientists are unsure of where the maritime archaic tradition began but the 48:15 · earliest evidence has been found here on the coast of Labrador when the French fishermen settled here 48:21 · in the 17th century they named this Bay lasamart the Bay of death the name 48:27 · gradually changed to La samur the Bay of love 48:32 · ironically the primary attraction of lasamour today is this burial mound 48:38 · excavated by Dr James tuck and Professor Robert McGee the site proved to be one of the most important Maritime archaic 48:45 · discoveries in North America when we first came we saw only a corner of it that had been exposed by this road 48:51 · construction and subsequent erosion we excavated the mound in quadrants and 48:58 · in near the center there was a rectangular Stone cyst made of upright Stones we were a little disappointed 49:05 · because there was no skeleton or any artifacts in there a little bit of red ocher but 49:11 · when we dug below the cyst just to make sure there was nothing there we were really surprised to find the skeleton of 49:17 · a child about 12 or 13 years old buried face down head to the West we don't know 49:23 · it was a male or female because it was too young to be able to tell it's an unusual burial especially for so 49:30 · much time and effort and expense to have been lavished on a young child 49:36 · it might be that these are not quite so much are not entirely for the disposal 49:42 · of the dead but represent as well renewal rights for the community holding the 49:47 · the community together a large flat Rock lay across the burial 49:52 · and ritual fires had been set due north and south the charcoal samples were radiocarbon 49:59 · dated to about 7 500 years ago making this the earliest known Maritime archaic 50:06 · burial site in North America the almost identical dates in both 50:11 · Europe and America were a surprise to scientists previous theories about cultural development from the 50:17 · antiquarians to yessing were based on the assumption that diffusion had to originate among the more advanced races 50:25 · of Europe but this new evidence suggests that cultural development may have been 50:30 · parallel on both sides of the Atlantic over 7 000 years ago the evidence also 50:35 · compels diffusionists to ask whether these ancient ceremonial Traditions were 50:40 · once carried from North America to the shores of Europe along the prevailing 50:46 · Northern route of the Gulf Stream the lansomware burial is also an 50:51 · important clue to the mystery of the mound builders in North America it predates the Mounds of the Midwest by 50:57 · more than 5 000 years I suppose you could consider this the start of a mound tradition in the new 51:04 · world this burial and the ones at brador and elsewhere are more than 7 000 years old I think 51:11 · therefore that the they're the oldest burial mounds certainly in this part of the world maybe in most of North America 51:18 · the artifacts themselves included toggling Harpoon of a design we've never 51:25 · seen before since and since it's 7 500 years old it's if not the oldest one of 51:30 · the oldest toggling harpoons that's ever been found so these guys were pretty sophisticated 51:36 · sea mammal Hunters from the time of Lance Amore the red 51:41 · paint people flourished for about 4 000 more years then without explanation the traces of 51:47 · their culture vanish from the archaeological record most of the artifacts we have seen were 51:52 · never intended for our eyes but of all their Remains the most intriguing are those which they wanted us to see 51:59 · the ritual monuments they left in the Landscapes of the Northeast Dr Fitzhugh believes that these ancient 52:06 · people the first to live on these subarctic coasts have left us a glimpse of an early ritual tradition as it 52:13 · appeared in the New World well one of the interesting features of the maritime archaic in Labrador at 52:20 · least is the association between ceremonial sites burial sites and eminent prominent locations and it 52:27 · seemed as though people were selecting these locations for qualities of the 52:33 · land high hills sweeping Vistas magnificent scenery as well as conditions that were 52:40 · suitable for Excavating burials Sandy Terraces and things like that the early Maritime archaic Mounds seemed 52:47 · to be individual structures with single burials in them on these prominent locations 52:53 · they're always at the fronts of The Terraces very near the sea very near the most sweeping Panorama that you can get 53:00 · the ballet Brack situation is probably the most dramatic I've seen but we have located a maybe 10 or 12 the maritime 53:09 · archaic burial areas and all of them have these characteristics they're not putting the ceremonial sites back in 53:16 · under the hills hiding them away it's as though the individual is buried you know wanted to be placed in such a position 53:22 · so that he could see out across the sea and I think the people were interested 53:27 · in this kind of a concept of beauty and Landscape mixed with mountains and 53:34 · waterfalls and everything else there's a lot of that in Labrador but the sites 53:39 · that they choose to live in are really rather special that way you don't find that with other cultures either with the 53:45 · Eskimo cultures or the other Indian cultures 53:50 · the discovery of the maritime archaic represents one of the rare instances when antiquarian mystery and scientific 53:58 · exploration have merged together they have revealed an unknown chapter in the ancient history of North 54:05 · America 54:14 · [Music] 54:20 · watch our next Nova program poison in the Rockies on Tuesday if you like at eight o'clock some scenes are coming up 54:25 · after which at one today we have this Sunday afternoon's feature film the scene a raging Storm a Florida hotel the 54:32 · guests held captive by a malevolent gangster key elements in Key Largo starring Humphrey Bogart Edward G 54:38 · Robinson Lauren Bacall Lionel Barrymore and Claire Trevor Key Largo presented uncut with no commercial interruptions 54:45 · next at one 55:02 · foreign foreign 55:08 · [Music]
Enough !
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Right back atcha.
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Thank you very much. As a lover of the archaic period, this is so fascinating. Morehead (self taught and scorned) was right in many instances.
Moorhead, duh...
Sorry, but the first thing that came to mind was the Red Faced people in the Guardians of the Galaxy.
Perhaps too much BabylonBee today.
Did the psychedelic influemces and fasting and rhythmic recipes bring anything about to relate natural and supernatural realms each to the other, that seem to be touching but not penetrating each other(?)
Thanks for your labors!
My pleasure.
They moved to India........................
Too much reading for me.
Did the red paint people come into north america prior to the waves of migration in circa 200 AD and 800 AD?
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