American opinions about the Mound Builders. Farther west, archaeological material was collected in the 1890s by geologists and surveyors from eastern Canada, many of them working for the Geological Survey of Canada. At this time, resident amateur archaeologists also began to study the Indian burials, middens, and the rock art of British Columbia.

Canadian archaeologists generally viewed Indians in the same way U.S. evolutionary anthropologists did: as peoples whose cultures were very primitive and therefore prehistorically must have been similar to what they were like at the time of European discovery. As a result, these archaeologists saw no need to try to work out elaborate chronologies. In Canada, the successful government efforts, after the Indians ceased to be useful allies against the United States, to move them as quietly as possible onto reserves or to more remote parts of the country meant that Indians did not loom large in the experience or imagination of most Euro-Canadians. In the United States, as prolonged and violent confrontations with aboriginal peoples came to an end, Indians were appropriated by their conquerors as romantic symbols of republican freedom, a theme that had little appeal for Canadians. As a result of these developments, there was far less pressure on governments in Canada than there was in the United States to devote public funds to prehistoric archaeological research.

The little interest that Canadians had in prehistoric archaeology waned in the early twentieth century. It was virtually extinct in the Maritimes by 1919, partly as a consequence of the economic decline of that region, and there was also diminishing interest in Manitoba, British Columbia, and Ontario as the broader concern to study Canada’s past that had arisen following confederation in 1867 subsided. No provincial government provided the means for training archaeologists or employment for them. Even the position of provincial archaeologist in Ontario lapsed after Boyle’s mediocre successor died in 1933.

In 1897, the Jesup North Pacific Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History began archaeological work in coastal British Columbia. This was the first of many foreign (mainly U.S. and Scandinavian) expeditions that carried out archaeological research in Canada, and in particular, they added to an understanding of Arctic prehistory. Although some of these expeditions provided Canadian archaeologists with opportunities to do fieldwork, others contributed nothing to the institutional development of Canadian archaeology and even retarded it by removing artifacts from Canada. Although such incursions into southern Canada had largely ceased the end of the century foreign expeditions continue to be authorized in northern Canada.

The Belated Development of Prehistoric Archaeology

A new phase in Canadian archaeology began in 1910 when the Geological Survey of Canada established an Anthropology Division. For many years, scientists attached to the survey had been collecting archaeological and ethnological material in western Canada, and pressure from a small number of Canadian amateur anthropologists and from the British Association for the Advancement of Science finally resulted in the allocation of government funds to this unit. Its first director was Edward Sapir, a young U.S. linguistic anthropologist who had studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University in New York City. Within two years, Sapir had hired Harlan Smith, a middle-aged U.S. archaeologist who had worked for the Jesup Expedition in British Columbia, and William Wintemberg, an amateur archaeologist from Ontario who had assisted Boyle. Working together in Ontario and Nova Scotia, Smith taught Wintemberg how to excavate and write site reports, with an emphasis on the functional interpretation of artifacts. Thereafter, despite frail health, Wintemberg carried out surveys and excavations in Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada), New Brunswick, and on the prairies while Smith continued to concentrate on British Columbia.

Wintemberg’s most important research was done in southern Ontario, where he worked out a rough chronology of Iroquoian cultural development. Yet, so great was his isolation from mainstream U.S. archaeology, it was only