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In the late 1940s Elmer Harp, a young PhD candidate at Harvard, began the first of five summers of exploration along the coast of the Strait of Belle Isle.
Interested in studying early human activity in the area he came to be equally fascinated with life in outport communities. During the summers of 1949-50 and 1961-63, he explored the coast, travelling from one isolated outport village to the next, initially by open boat and later on rudimentary roads, vividly capturing everyday life in his journals and through his extensive Kodachrome slides. In her introduction Priscilla Renouf places Harp's story of rural northern Newfoundland in historical and anthropological context. She notes that there are economic and cultural continuities from prehistoric times to the present and shows that the fundamental structure of outport life based on fishing and hunting remains today.
"This book is a delight, and can be appreciated on several levels. It gives a brief course on Northern Peninsula prehistory and on the years when the area was a new part of Canada. Early peoples and mid-twentieth-century people lived on the same land. The
"Visually stunning and elegantly written narrative … Harp has transcended the role of scholar and emerged as photographer and storyteller. This book is worthy of shelf-sharing with other Newfoundland classics. It is easy to read, has no jargon, and is highly recommended as a resource book for the general public and academics alike." Latonia Hartery, Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary
Elmer Harp Jr. (1913-2009) was professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, a department which he founded in 1967. His thirty-five-year career included numerous expeditions to the central and eastern Canadian Arctic, as well as work in Alaska.
M.A.P. Renouf is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Canada Research Chair in North Atlantic Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland. For the past 27 years the primary focus of her archaeological research has been Port au Choix and elsewhere on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.