Indigenous Traces on Basque Sites: Direct Contact or Later Reoccupation?

Delmas discusses the indigeneous traces on Basque sites. Debate on possible contact between Basques and the local inhabitants carried into the study of Inuit, Iroquoian, and presumed Innu materials found during the excavation of Basque sites, from Labrador to the mouth of the Saguenay River. The archaeologists of these sites in the 1980s and 1990s regularly concluded that these contexts and materials could not be interpreted as signs of direct contact, based on stratigraphic uncertainty but also because simultaneous presence did not fit with the accepted dates of Basque occupations, Inuit presence in the Strait of Belle Isle, and Iroquoian "disappearance" from the St. by French inhabitants. Indigenous presence is reflected by seasonal camps near or in the centres of Basque activity, and by diagnostic materials occurring in some cases far from their core territory, notably the Iroquoian pottery at Red Bay.