Port Au Choix - National Historic Site

National Historic Site

Port au Choix is a National Historic Site of Canada, and the community is regarded as one of the richest archeological finds in North America. Burial sites uncovered in the town in the 1960s & 70's provide evidence of its most early settlers - from the Maritime Archaic Indians to the Groswater and Dorset Palaeoeskimos to the Recent Indians (ancestors of the Beothuks). While prehistoric coastlines elsewhere have long since slipped beneath the encroaching ocean, the raised shoreline and alkaline soil conditions at Port au Choix have combined to preserve a time capsule of great historical importance.

Because of the cultural significance of this burial site, and a successful local lobby, the site was officially designated a National Historic Site in 1970. In 2001, Parks Canada constructed a new Visitor Centre and Museum dedicated to the rich history of these native people - the first ever to inhabit Newfoundland, dating back over 5000 years.

Read more about this topic:  Port Au Choix

Famous quotes containing the words national, historic and/or site:

    Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments.
    —French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed Aug. 1789, published Sept. 1791)

    The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination—unstanchable as that red flood may be—but rather the albumen in the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman’s fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)