Human habitation in Newfoundland and Labrador can be traced back about 9000 years. The Maritime Archaic peoples were groups of Archaic cultures of sea-mammal hunters in the subarctic. They prospered from approximately 7,000 BC – 1,500 BC (9,000–3,500 years ago) along the Atlantic Coast of North America. Their settlements included longhouses and boat-topped temporary or seasonal houses. They engaged in long-distance trade, using as currency white chart, a rock quarried from northern Labrador to Maine. The Maritime Archaic period is best known from mortuary site in Newfoundland at Port au Choux. The Maritime Archaic peoples were gradually displaced by people of the Dorset Culture (last majorPaleo-Eskimo) and then by the Inuit in Labrador and the Boethius on the island of Newfoundland. The Dorset Culture (800 BC – 1500) were highly adapted to living in a very cold climate, and much of their food came from hunting sea mammals through holes in the ice. The massive decline in sea-ice which the Medieval Warm Period produced would have had a devastating impact upon their way of life.
The appearance of the Boathook culture is believed the most recent cultural manifestation of peoples who first migrated from Labrador to Newfoundland around 1 AD. Inuit are the descendants of what anthropologists call the Thule culture, who emerged from western Alaska around 1000 AD and spread eastwards across the Arctic, reaching Labrador around 1300–1500. Researchers believe that the Dorset culture lacked dogs, larger weapons and other technologies that gave the expanding Inuit society an advantage. With the passage of time, groups started to focus on resources available to them locally. The inhabitants eventually organized themselves into small bands of a few families, grouped into larger tribes and chieftainships. The Innu are the inhabitants of an area they refer to as Nitassinan, which comprises most of what is now referred to as north-eastern Quebec and Labrador. Their
