Institutions and Regional Integration on the Maritime Peninsula: Why Natural History Societies Still Matter.

The Maritime Peninsula, the eastern homeland of the Wabanaki, forms a defensible archaeological region, but one divided by an international border. Research from either side of the border remains poorly integrated. In this paper, I consider the history of the institutional-scale research in the region--that is, the organizations supporting, publishing, and regulating archaeological research. Archaeology in the State of Maine developed an outward orientation early on, with research largely sponsored by out-of-state institutions. In contrast, work in the Maritime provinces (Maritimes) was dominated by local natural history societies. A relative dearth of research on both sides of the border for much of the twentieth century served to secure these trends before they were calcified legislatively at the provincial level in the Maritimes and in connection with federal legislation in Maine. As a result, archaeology in the Maritimes is marked in large part by a focus on objects and inventories of objects, a generalist approach that blurs historical and precontact archaeology, and an iterative approach to defining archaeological significance. In contrast, work in Maine tends to emphasize survey and the definition of sites and is more clearly problem oriented with conservative criteria for historical significance. As a result, attempts at regional integration may need to be aimed at some of these scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]