The 2023-2024 AnthroGuide is the last print version. Edits for graduate programs are due July 31, 2023.

Quentin Mackie

Primary Field
Archaeology
Position
Associate Professor
http://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/anthropology
Associate Professor, University of Victoria, Department of Anthropology
E-mail
qxm@uvic.ca
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Knowledge / Expertise
Interest/Specialty Areas Archaeology, stone tools
Biography

For the past fifteen years I have worked routinely in Haida Gwaii, in collaboration with Parks Canada archaeologists. Together we have found or excavated a series of sites from near the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary (the period when modern climatic and vegetation conditions were established). This is a time of rapid environmental change – literally, it may be the Time of Transformation related in Haida oral histories.

Early sites on Haida Gwaii are changing our thoughts on the earliest occupation of the Northwest Coast and the Americas. Seeing how Ancestral Haida people were fluent in marine resource use and organic technologies so early adds context to broader models of early West Coast occupation. They also show human occupation at a time of extreme environmental change, which attests to the resilience of these early coastal adaptations. We also maintain a research interest in the archaeology of the drowned landscapes of the continental shelf.

More recently, Daryl Fedje and I have started a new project focused on the Pleistocene-Holocene transition on Quadra Islands and the surrounding Discovery Islands in the northern Salish Sea.  This Tula-funded research aims to understand human response to rapidly falling sea levels as well as geoarchaeological understanding of site formation processes during times of rapid environmental change. Follow our blogs to find out what we are up to: BC Studies and Hakai.

Interests

  • Archaeology
  • Haida Gwaii 
  • Salish Sea
  • Stone tools
  • Northwest Coast
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Organizations