Maine History Online

Maine's first human arrivals wandered a boggy land of sedges and grasses punctuated by scattered stands of birch, willow, alder, and spruce. Wooly mammoths roamed the grassy plains, herds of mastodons browsed on the emerging coniferous forest, and giant beaver built homes in the vast bogs and wetlands.

Since the retreat of the glaciers some 12,000 years ago, Maine has been a crossroads of culture and a seat of innovation. Whether its prehistory reveals a single evolving culture as some believe, or a succession of new arrivals, the changing way of life suggests a people adapting in innovative ways to new environmental challenges.

Maine forms the neck of a huge geographic formation known as the Maritime Peninsula, stretching north from New England to the Gaspé. The two features that define this peninsula, the St. Lawrence River and the coastal plain, served as great highways connecting Maine to cultures far to the west and south and bringing periodic infusions of new ideas and new people.

This cultural dynamism was stimulated by profound environmental changes in the post-glacial landscape. Concentrations of forest, lake, river, and ocean resources changed dramatically over the millennia, and people responded with new technologies, foodways, and social organizations.

Viewing changes over the millennia between glacial retreat and European arrival – the two great benchmarks in Maine prehistory – shows this cultural dynamism in high relief.

The story of Maine begins with the glaciers. About 2 million years ago the world's climate began to change, bringing a long period of glacial advance and retreat that lasted, geologically speaking, almost up to the present.

At its maximum 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, the ice cap was as much as 5,000 feet thick, leaving only the tip of Katahdin exposed – a tiny rock island in a vast sea of ice.

Stone-age hunters called Paleoindians developed a distinctive stone spear-tip known as the Clovis or Folsom point about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Clovis technology exists throughout North America. Evidence of Clovis points in the Northeast date to about 11,500 years ago.

As the ice retreated about 12,000 years ago, it left behind a classic deglaciated landscape, with rounded gravelly hills, wide, U-shaped valleys, numerous lakes and bogs, thin soils of clay, silt, and sand, and an abundance of stones and boulders.

Maine's first human arrivals wandered a boggy land of sedges and grasses punctuated by scattered stands of birch, willow, alder, and spruce. Wooly mammoths roamed the grassy plains, herds of mastodons browsed on the emerging coniferous forest, and giant beaver built homes in the vast bogs and wetlands.

Although the archaeological record is far from complete, it suggests a scattering of small, mobile hunting bands. The Paleoindian's signature tool was a large fluted projectile point mounted on a spear and launched with a spear-thrower, or atlatl.

In Maine, archaeologists have found several distinctive variations on this point, suggesting an exchange of ideas and a rapid adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Given their size, these spear points hint at epic battles with mammoths and mastodons, and several Algonquian stories contain dim memories of elephant-like monsters.

But scraps of caribou bone in the archaeological record suggest these more modest creatures as the major item on the Paleoindian menu, along with small mammals and birds taken where pioneer forests offered respite in the tundra landscape. Caribou concentrate in herds in fall and migrate to breeding areas, and these predictable seasonal movements drew small, kinship-related Paleoindian bands in their wake.

The largest collection of Paleoindian artifacts in this area is the Vail site on the Magalloway River in western Maine. Now flooded by the Aziscohos dam, the site yielded some 4,000 tools, primarily scrapers, fluted points, wedges, and cutters, suggesting a seasonal encampment occupied over several centuries. Nearby hills constricted the migrating herds and gave hunters an opportunity to intercept them.

Similarities between the tools found here and those from sites in Nova Scotia and eastern Massachusetts imply a basic cultural unity across this vast Maritime Peninsula, but the Vail site also contained exotic artifacts, made of materials from as far away as western Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania. Along their seasonal migrations, Paleoindian hunters undoubtedly met other wandering bands, with whom they exchanged gifts.

Distinctive Clovis points and other Paleoindian artifacts from around 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, diminished. This happened during the transition from tundra to boreal forest, suggesting that the new "low diversity" environment triggered a radical change in their subsistence activity.

Paleoindians lived in a rapidly changing world where the tundra grasses gave way to open woodlands, and then forests of birch, spruce, and pine. They no doubt took advantage of a variety of resources, but the newly arrived species of fish, plants, birds, and small game had not settled into reliable patterns, and thus the Paleoindians depended primarily on the moving herds of caribou – a choice that tied them to the fate of the tundra and its host species.