Elmer Harp, Jr.

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Dr. Elmer Harp has made vital contributions to the archaeological and ethnographic studies of Newfoundland and Labrador. Now professor emeritus of anthropology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, he conducted the formative work that made the prehistory of Newfoundland and Labrador so important in our archaeological record.

Dr. Harp’s career has included numerous expeditions to the Central and Eastern Canadian Arctic, and work in Alaska. In 1949-1950 he began his archaeological field research in the Eastern Subarctic where he surveyed the Strait of Belle Isle area, and discovered and tested several Paleo-Eskimo sites on the west coast of Newfoundland and the Archaic Indian sites in southern Labrador.

Dr. Harp then spent time as a senior Fulbright Research Scholar in Copenhagen, at the Danish National Museum in 1959, after which he returned to Newfoundland and excavated in Port au Choix, Phillip’s Garden on Cape Riche. Dr. Harp’s 1971 paper on this work remains an important contribution to the discipline and led to Dr. Jim Tuck’s discovery of the 4,000 year old Maritime Archaic cemetery.

Dr. Harp’s photographic record of the recent peoples of Newfoundland’s west coast is also of considerable value. His slide collection, made in the years just after Confederation, conveys a sense of the daily lives of Newfoundlanders in a way no contemporary record does. One of his latest works is a photographic memoir of outport Newfoundland and Labrador from 1949-1963, titled Lives and Landscapes, which was edited by Memorial University’s Canada Research Chair of North Atlantic Archaeology, Dr. Priscilla Renouf.

Pages >> Biographical Notes | Address to Convocation | Oration