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xi one considers that unlike the eastern Great Lakes—which are today densely populated, heavily developed, and under intense cultivation—much of the Far Northeast is rugged and forested with much lower density populations and much less modern development. Combined with the fact that finding any of these rare early sites is difficult, literally like finding a needle in a haystack, locating even one site in this landscape is exceedingly difficult, although like Claude Chapdelaine (this volume) one can be extremely lucky. Clearly we are way beyond the situation in the 1970s when only a handful of Far Northeast sites—such as Debert, Nova Scotia (MacDonald 1968), Bull Brook, Massachusetts (Byers 1953), and Reagen, Vermont (Ritchie 1953)—were known or widely reported. And, as other recent publications (e.g., Robinson et al. 2009) and the chapters in this volume by Rosenmeier et al., Crock and F. Robinson, and Brian Robinson make abundantly clear, there are still many things we can learn about even those long-known sites. The syntheses presented here also confirm earlier suggestions , going back to at least Spiess and Wilson’s (1987:129– 155) conception of a “New England–Maritimes Paleoindian Region,” that the Far Northeast is distinctive in the earlier time periods and notably in relation to the areas I know best just to the west. Evidence of this distinctiveness has been somewhat clear from near the beginning, such as in the presence of deeply indented-base fluted points from sites like Debert, and the more recent work reported here only serves to confirm these differences and highlight more of them. To be sure, there are echoes of similarity that have to indicate a common origin and some degree of interaction between these two areas: the presence of the ultra-thin Crowfield type fluted points (Deller and Ellis 1984), well known in southern Ontario, at sites like Reagan, or even the recovery from Quebec’s first reported fluted point site (Cliche-Rancourt: Chapdelaine, this volume) of a single example of the rare but distinctive large alternately beveled bifaces/knives reported from several Ontario sites (Ellis and I am very pleased to provide some comments that can serve as a brief preview of this fine collection of studies pertaining to the earliest known human occupants of the Far Northeast (northern New England and adjacent area of Canada). The volume brings together several up-to-date regional data syntheses, for which there is always a need (and especially in these days when many discoveries can remain hidden in gray CRM or planning literature or deep in the bowels of small museum collections), as well as specialized studies that address several mostly well-known problems pertaining to the age, geological and paleoenvironmental context, and subsistence practices of these early peoples. I am especially happy to see the results of CRM work being published (e.g., Boisvert, Spiess et al., this volume) and the increasing involvement of local Native communities in exploring, managing, and protecting cultural resources (Rosenmeier et al., this volume). Throughout the volume, progress is evident on several other fronts: to name but a few examples, identifying stone raw material sources (Boisvert), isolating potential routes of entry or migration into the area (Lothrop and Bradley), explaining site formation processes (Courchesne et al.), documenting and understanding site layouts and the spatial organization of activities (Chapdelaine; Rosenmeier et al.), and determining the particular geographic settings that were being sought for occupation (Crock and Robinson ; Spiess et al.). Even more basic, and with Maine leading the way in discoveries, the syntheses show that the number of actual sites reported has grown exponentially and puts to shame the recent efforts in areas where I have worked, notably the central to eastern Great Lakes, where work has tailed off somewhat since the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s. Although several new sites have been discovered through CRM activities in Ontario, unlike the Far Northeast there has been little effort to publish that work (although there are exceptions such as Woodley [2004]). The number of finds is even more remarkable when foreword xii Foreword by the Younger Dryas climatic event, which apparently had more limited and less rapidly appearing consequences for Paleoindian peoples living elsewhere (Meltzer and Holliday 2010)—including, although the exact extent of the effects is disputed, the Great Lakes (Ellis et al. 2011; Eren 2009). Several authors in this volume also suggest that these peoples were able to, and were, exploiting...

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