La Martre, Québec
Ralph digs again
August 9th 1997

Today I scraped the rust from my trowel! I was a guest, for a sunny and cheerful hour, at an archaeological excavation on the plateau above La Martre, a small town on the north coast of the Gaspé peninsula, Québec.

It was a wonderful feeling, and soon had all my archaeological juices flowing. AND I managed to find a couple of retouched chert flakes under the tutilege of Eric Chalifoux, who was supervising a group of students from Université de Monréal.

Eric is working on his PhD, which will include research on the stone artifacts that are turning up in large numbers on the dig.

No stratigraphy has appeared yet, the result of recent disturbance by the removal of tree stumps and ploughing, but large numbers of chert flakes and smaller numbers of tools have been turning up in all the test holes dug over a large area of what was once a shelf above a higher sea level, close to readily-available sources of raw materials.

Questions Eric will be looking at include the reason for the site's location — were humans there 8-9,000 years ago to mine the chert and manufacture implements, or was the occurrence of chert just a bonus near a habitation site? Implements made from chert from La Martre have been found on other sites to the west.

The excavation ran until the end of August, and visitors were welcome, both on the site and at the nearby exhibition. Eric is going to be back this summer (1998).

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