Thousands of years ago, Maine\'s Red Paint People, so called because of the red ochre in their burial sites, were among the first maritime cultures in the Americas.
A half century later, as Maine archaeology was undergoing a revival, a new genera.
The mystery of the Red Paint People was left hanging.
Then interest in the so-called Red Paint cemeteries waned as American archaeologists began to broaden their horizons to other continents.
Museum collections grew quickly, but so did confusion about what kind of culture could have produced these wonderful objects.
Between then and 1920, other archaeologists became involved, searching for and discovering more than a dozen new cemeteries.
They began to visit and to excavate these sites and introduced them to the world in 1893 at Chicago\'s World\'s Columbian Exposition.
Local naturalists brought these finds to the attention of a new breed of scientist--archaeologists who were busy developing their new science at the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University.
These were Ancient graves clustered into large cemeteries.
Strangest of all, they came from pits filled with a brilliant red powder called red ocher.
Many were large and finely crafted, some made of beautiful stone from far-off places.
They were quickly recognized as prehistoric artifacts of stone, but they were very unlike the spear tips and other small artifacts collectors gathered from coastal sites as they eroded into the sea.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, strange objects began to come out of the ground in Hancock County, Maine.
Anyone with even a passing interest in New England\'s deep maritime roots must read this book.
This book explains beautifully the preHistory of these people, the evolution of archaeological thinking about them, and the myriad new scientific threads that shed new light on this old culture.
They could have subsisted on easily caught cod, but they chose to capture dangerous and elusive swordfish.
Thousands of years ago, Maine\'s Red Paint People, so called because of the red ochre in their burial sites, were among the first maritime cultures in the Americas
