40 
PRELIMINARY REPORT ON FIELD WORK IN 1927 
By W. J. Wintemberg 
Commencing at Tadoussac, the writer collected many stone artifacts 
from the exposed surface of workshop sites on windswept, sandy terraces 
to the north of the village and east as far as Moulin h Baude river. The 
deposit in which artifacts and workshop debris occurred in situ was located 
by trenching what seemed to be the least disturbed portions of two of the 
terraces north of Tadoussac. The artifacts found in excavating were of 
the same types as those from the surface. The only evidences of habitation 
discovered consisted of a few scattered patches of ashes, a few small frag- 
ments of charcoal, and some whitened, brittle animal bones. Artifacts 
found on the surface and in trenching consist of: lozenge-shaped and leaf- 
shaped points for arrows, spears, and knives chipped from chert, quartz, 
and quartzite; a few semi-lunar knives or scrapers chipped from quartz; 
a fragment of a slate spear or knife blade, diamond shaped in cross-section; 
several fragments of long, pointed slate objects; a large, heavy, unfinished, 
pear-shaped stone plummet; many unfinished, one whole, and a few broken, 
stone adzes; one whole and a few fragments of long, thin, chisel-like objects 
of slate; a fragment of a stone gouge, apparently of the flaring type and 
similar to two found by Moorehead in “Red Paint” graves in Maine; 
several stones used as anvils; many hammerstones, a few of which are 
pitted; a few disk hammers or pounders; a whetstone; a few rectangular 
scraper blades chipped from stone; and a rubbed piece of what appears 
to be hematite, which was probably used as paint. No pottery was 
discovered. Chips of quartz, quartzite, quartz crystals, sandstone, slate, 
porphyry, and other rocks were abundant. All but one of the adze blades 
were of an unusual type. So far as can be determined from their broken 
condition, they were highly finished, long and slender, flat-backed blades, 
most of them half-round and a few others somewhat triangular in cross- 
section. The front of most of them appears to have been convex from end 
to end, in which respect they resemble what Moorhead calls “hump backed” 
adzes, found by him in “Red Paint” graves. They seem to have been 
widest at the middle and the poll was narrower than the cutting end. The 
poll of a few blades is curved outward. All of them have a convex cutting 
edge. It is hard to say why these adzes were broken, some of them into 
three and four pieces. It does not seem to have been from use, because 
none of the cutting edges is broken. The unbroken adze is a short, thick 
blade of a type frequently found on Aigonkian sites elsewhere in eastern 
Canada. Other artifacts, which are characteristic of these workshop 
sites, consist ot what seem to have been long, slender, and mostly cylindrical 
lance points of slate, some of them highly polished. 
Although the absence of pottery, small, finely chipped, and notched 
points for arrows, notched points for spears, perforated stone objects, 
drill points, and grooved axes, suggest that the culture of these sites is 
archaic Aigonkian, it may be merely a local phase of a later stage of Aigon- 
kian culture. The people here were probably not “Red Paint” people, 
although a few artifacts are like some that are characteristic of that culture. 
