James Tuck (archaeologist)


James A. Tuck, 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.

Career

Tuck was born in Buffalo in 1940; he received a doctoral degree from Syracuse University. He subsequently began teaching and practicing archaeology as a faculty member at Memorial University of Newfoundland. 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.
The remains of 113 Inuit – 100 from Rose Island and 13 from Upernavik Island were repatriated and reburied 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.
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 site.
Tuck was a supporter of Patricia Sutherland's controversial theory 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. He died on May 10, 2019 at the age of 79 at Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts.

Awards