My dude I'm filled with a raging fire of curiousity now I also live in Atlantic Canada and have never heard of any ancient indigenous archaeological sites??? Please help Google isn't answering my questions and you seem very passionate about the subject.
Oh buddy, let me tell you about the Debert-Belmont PaleoIndian (Sa’qewe’l L’nu’k) Site Complex.
It was first identified in 1948 and partially excavated in the 1960s. The site is deposited in what we refer to as a massive sand event, and it’s the reason why in Nova Scotia we sometimes dig sites to “Debert Standards” (meaning we must dig shovel tests to 1.2m deep and then continue by hand-augering if we haven’t hit glacial till or a refusal on bedrock).
Debert is among the oldest and arguably the most significant sites in North America, and it includes both primary contexts (original sites that were buried including hearths and other elements of habitation sites) and secondary contexts (sites/objects that may have washed down from higher ground, making predictive modelling very difficult and necessitating very thorough shovel testing). Radiocarbon dating places this site at minimum 11,000 years old, and most local archaeologists agree it’s probably more like 13,000 years old.
(Above is from the report of the awesome geologist Ralph Stea -Â http://www.steasurficial.ca/pdf/dbsite.pdf)
The site is known for some very distinctive and very ancient artifact types, such as fluted points, and it seems that the area was a seasonal encampment site for early big game hunters - Nova Scotia had a lot of very large animals at that time, which was around the close of the last ice age.
Other signs of very ancient sites have been identified in Nova Scotia, but Debert is definitely the most complete and well-documented - most of the other material in Nova Scotia have been tantalizing isolated finds instead of in situ sites. Sometimes scallop draggers in the Bay of Fundy will kick up a stone ulu, since millennia ago the Bay was dry land, and the knives are about the right size and shape to be caught by something designed to bring up scallops.
Debert, and First Nations sites in general, are very much not my specialty - I’m an industrial archaeologist and a buildings archaeologist, but as a consultant I need to know a little about every archaeological period in NS as I might be called to work on any of them. So, I’ll leave you with this link for some more detailed info:
http://www.mikmaweydebert.ca/home/ancestors-live-here/debert/understanding-and-protecting-the-sites/
