In the late 1940s Elmer Harp, a young Ph.D candidate at Harvard, began the first of five summers of exploration along the coast of the Strait of Belle Isle. Interested in studying early human activity in the area he came to be equally fascinated with life in outport communities. During the summers of 1949-50 and 1961-63, he explored the coast, travelling from one isolated outport village to the next, initially by open boat and later on rudimentary roads, vividly capturing everyday life in his journals and through his extensive Kodachrome slides. In her introduction Priscilla Renouf places Harp's story of rural northern Newfoundland in historical and anthropological context. She notes that there are economic and cultural continuities from prehistoric times to the present and shows that the fundamental structure of outport life based on fishing and hunting remains stable to this very day.

Elmer Harp Jr. (1913-2009) was professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, a department which he founded in 1967. His thirty-five-year career included numerous expeditions to the central and eastern Canadian Arctic, as well as work in Alaska. M.A.P. Renouf is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Canada Research Chair in North Atlantic Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland. For the past 27 years the primary focus of her archaeological research has been Port au Choix and elsewhere on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.

Elmer Harp Jr's profile page