Mount Desert Island - History

History


Deep shell heaps indicate American Indian encampments dating back 6,000 years in Acadia National Park, but prehistoric records are scanty. The first written descriptions of Maine coast Indians, recorded 100 years after European trade contacts began, describe American Indians who lived off the land by hunting, fishing, collecting shellfish, and gathering plants and berries. The Wabanaki Indians knew Mount Desert Island as Pemetic, "the sloping land". They built bark-covered conical shelters, and traveled in exquisitely designed birch bark canoes. Historical notes record that the Wabanaki wintered in interior forests and spent their summers near the coast. Archeological evidence suggests the opposite pattern; in order to avoid harsh inland winters and to take advantage of salmon runs upstream, American Indians wintered on the coast and summered inland.

Read more about this topic:  Mount Desert Island

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
    —Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    “Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
    —Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)

    “You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
    —Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)