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James A. Tuck, ONL FRSC (June 28, 1940 [1] – May 10, 2019) was an American-born archaeologist whose work as a faculty member of the Memorial University of Newfoundland was focused on the early history of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tuck was born in Buffalo, New York in 1940; [1] he received a doctoral degree from Syracuse University. [2] He subsequently began teaching and practicing archaeology as a faculty member at Memorial University of Newfoundland. [3] Since the late 1960s, Tuck focused his archaeological work in Newfoundland and Labrador.
His early work included unearthing the Maritime Archaic burial ground at Port au Choix. From 1977 until the late 1980s he excavated the sixteenth century Basque whaling station at Red Bay Labrador.
Starting in 1969 he led teams that excavated Inuit graves on Rose Island which is now in Torngat Mountains National Park. [4] [5] which is viewed by the local Inuit as a desecration and robbery. This led to the remains of 113 Inuit – 100 from Rose Island and 13 from Upernavik Island being repatriated and reburied in a common grave in 1995. A further 11 Inuit remains were repatriated in a special ceremony on August 16, 2011, attended by the Honourable Kathy Dunderdale, Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nunatsiavut President Jim Lyall. [6]
Since the late 1980s, Tuck worked on unearthing the Province of Avalon located at Ferryland. To date the dig has found and catalogued over two million artifacts from the 4-acre (16,000 m2) site.[ citation needed]
Tuck was a supporter of Patricia Sutherland's controversial theory [7] [8] [9] that there was European contact with the Dorset on Baffin Island, Canada, hundreds of years before the Norse started settling in Greenland in 985 CE. [10] He died on May 10, 2019, at the age of 79 at Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. [11] [12]
... Michele Hayeur Smith of Brown University in Rhode Island, lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Hayeur Smith and her colleagues were looking at scraps of yarn, perhaps used to hang amulets or decorate clothing, from ancient sites on Baffin Island and the Ungava Peninsula. The idea that you would have to learn to spin something from another culture was a bit ludicrous," she said. "It's a pretty intuitive thing to do.
However, the date received on Sample 4440b from Nanook clearly indicates that sinew was being spun and plied at least as early, if not earlier, than yarn at this site. We feel that the most parsimonious explanation of this data is that the practice of spinning hair and wool into plied yarn most likely developed naturally within this context of complex, indigenous, Arctic fiber technologies, and not through contact with European textile producers. [. . .] Our investigations indicate that Paleoeskimo (Dorset) communities on Baffin Island spun threads from the hair and also from the sinews of native terrestrial grazing animals, most likely musk ox and arctic hare, throughout the Middle Dorset period and for at least a millennium before there is any reasonable evidence of European activity in the islands of the North Atlantic or in the North American Arctic
In fact, Fitzhugh thinks the cord at the centre of Sutherland's "eureka" moment is a Dorset artifact. "We have very good evidence that this kind of spun cordage was being used hundreds of years before the Norse arrived in the New World, in other words 500 to 600 CE, at the least," he says.
![]() | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's
notability guideline for biographies. (June 2013) |
James A. Tuck, ONL FRSC (June 28, 1940 [1] – May 10, 2019) was an American-born archaeologist whose work as a faculty member of the Memorial University of Newfoundland was focused on the early history of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tuck was born in Buffalo, New York in 1940; [1] he received a doctoral degree from Syracuse University. [2] He subsequently began teaching and practicing archaeology as a faculty member at Memorial University of Newfoundland. [3] Since the late 1960s, Tuck focused his archaeological work in Newfoundland and Labrador.
His early work included unearthing the Maritime Archaic burial ground at Port au Choix. From 1977 until the late 1980s he excavated the sixteenth century Basque whaling station at Red Bay Labrador.
Starting in 1969 he led teams that excavated Inuit graves on Rose Island which is now in Torngat Mountains National Park. [4] [5] which is viewed by the local Inuit as a desecration and robbery. This led to the remains of 113 Inuit – 100 from Rose Island and 13 from Upernavik Island being repatriated and reburied in a common grave in 1995. A further 11 Inuit remains were repatriated in a special ceremony on August 16, 2011, attended by the Honourable Kathy Dunderdale, Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nunatsiavut President Jim Lyall. [6]
Since the late 1980s, Tuck worked on unearthing the Province of Avalon located at Ferryland. To date the dig has found and catalogued over two million artifacts from the 4-acre (16,000 m2) site.[ citation needed]
Tuck was a supporter of Patricia Sutherland's controversial theory [7] [8] [9] that there was European contact with the Dorset on Baffin Island, Canada, hundreds of years before the Norse started settling in Greenland in 985 CE. [10] He died on May 10, 2019, at the age of 79 at Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. [11] [12]
... Michele Hayeur Smith of Brown University in Rhode Island, lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Hayeur Smith and her colleagues were looking at scraps of yarn, perhaps used to hang amulets or decorate clothing, from ancient sites on Baffin Island and the Ungava Peninsula. The idea that you would have to learn to spin something from another culture was a bit ludicrous," she said. "It's a pretty intuitive thing to do.
However, the date received on Sample 4440b from Nanook clearly indicates that sinew was being spun and plied at least as early, if not earlier, than yarn at this site. We feel that the most parsimonious explanation of this data is that the practice of spinning hair and wool into plied yarn most likely developed naturally within this context of complex, indigenous, Arctic fiber technologies, and not through contact with European textile producers. [. . .] Our investigations indicate that Paleoeskimo (Dorset) communities on Baffin Island spun threads from the hair and also from the sinews of native terrestrial grazing animals, most likely musk ox and arctic hare, throughout the Middle Dorset period and for at least a millennium before there is any reasonable evidence of European activity in the islands of the North Atlantic or in the North American Arctic
In fact, Fitzhugh thinks the cord at the centre of Sutherland's "eureka" moment is a Dorset artifact. "We have very good evidence that this kind of spun cordage was being used hundreds of years before the Norse arrived in the New World, in other words 500 to 600 CE, at the least," he says.