in Quebec City and the Jesuits found old Indian burials, as did many settlers. There is even a private collection of prehistoric artifacts assembled around 1700. However, such accidental meetings with relics of the past had little to do with the discipline of archaeology.

Early colonists in Quebec had just divorced European history and it took some time before they would call for a history of their own. They were busy creating the present, fighting for existence, and articulating a new way of life. They really had no time for history until the English told them they had none. To show that the English were wrong, the colonists of Quebec created throughout the nineteenth century a true database of their colonial history—but they did not use archaeology as it is now defined (Gagnon, 1978).

The database included miscellaneous collections from individuals who found material traces of missionary establishments on the shore of Lac St-Jean, excavated a Jesuit burial place in Quebec City, reported old French forts on the North Shore, and discussed whether some of the remains were left by Jacques Cartier’s visits or where Champlain’s burial place was, but these were unconnected events of no lasting value.

The archaeology of American Indians fared no better. The wild people had been both friends and foes of Quebec colonists during the earlier European occupation. They were considered interesting in as far as they had interacted in some ways with the settlers but, in the nineteenth century, although they were still of some importance to missionaries, fur traders, and some travelers, they were not interesting to most of the inhabitants of Quebec.

Some accidental discoveries were talked about for some time during the nineteenth century. The most important one was the Iroquoian site found in 1859 near the campus of McGill University and described by John William Dawson, principal of the university. Indian burials were also found in Trois-Rivieres and Valleyfield. Robert Sellar reported other chance findings in southwestern Quebec in 1888 and Montpetit talked about the discovery of Indian tomahawks on Pointe-du-Buisson. Joseph Charles Tache collected antiquities from Huronia and other places but only one man became involved in the meaning of these material traces. He was a lawyer from Montreal, William Douw Lighthall (1857–1954). He went as far as to write a book on prehistoric Montreal in 1929 but never succeeded in publishing it.

Four years earlier, A. Gagnon had published his Études archéologiques (1925) but he had nothing to say about Quebec antiquities in this book, in which he confessed that his best friends told him that his interests in the past were useless. At about the same time, William J. Wintemberg (1876–1941) made a productive survey of southern Quebec (1927), but he never returned from Ottawa to excavate the sites he had located. One of these, the Lanoraie site, was excavated in 1932 by A. Beaugrand-Champagne but there exists no record of what he found.

Until 1940, only one small-scale but problematic excavation had taken place in Quebec, in 1915 in Tadoussac by the American ethnologist Frank G. Speck. In the following years a few more experts came to Quebec (Rogers and Rogers, Burger, Bradley, Ridley, and Taylor) and collected some artifacts. By 1960 the whole bibliography of published papers on archaeology in Quebec amounted to less than twenty titles, and these were of limited value (Martijn and Cinq-Mars 1970; Martijn 1974, 1978; Cinq-Mars and Martijn 1981; Clermont 1982, 1987).

From 1955 to 1960, archaeology developed as a topic of some interest within Quebec’s regional communities. Gordon Lowther, Albert Gérin-Lajoie, Rene Lévesque, Gilles Boulet, Michel Gaumond, and others began to dream about some kind of involvement in Quebec Archaeology. This came about in the 1960s.

In the 1960s, avocational archaeologists such a Rene Lévesque, W.L. Bancroft, Rene Ribes, J. Henri Fortin, Thomas Lee, Robert Simard, Joseph Bérubé, James Pendergast, Clyde Kennedy, and others proved that good archaeological sites were to be found everywhere in Quebec. The Université de Montreal initiated a general program of archaeology in 1961. A Service d’Archéologie was created in the same year by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Gilles Boulet set up a Museum of Archaeology at Trois-Rivieres