Labrador Beothuk: A reconsideration of the Point Revenge complex

The fate of Labrador's Point Revenge complex has been a subject of educated speculation amongst archaeologists working in Labrador for fifty years. The understanding of the relationship between this archaeological culture and ethnographically known Indigenous populations such as the Beothuk and Innu has also had an interesting history and has been considered a settled matter by some archaeologists for the past three decades. In this paper we examine three hypotheses on the fate of the Point Revenge complex as laid out in the literature, and we test them against archaeological data, relying on the locations of known archaeological sites and the presence or absence of diagnostic stone tools. The results suggest that the people of the Point Revenge complex did not disappear from the archaeological record in the early colonial period, but instead they returned to the island of Newfoundland in the early sixteenth century rather than migrating to the interior of Labrador. Our research provides additional support for a long-recognized relationship between the Point Revenge and contemporaneous archaeological cultures on the Island of Newfoundland and the Quebec North Shore and between these cultures and the historically known Beothuk of Newfoundland.