Introduction: the Early Modern Newfoundland, to 1700

THIS IS THE SECOND OF TWO NUMBERS of Newfoundland Studies devoted to early modernNewfoundland. The original ideawas to present a collection of work by archaeologists, historians, and historical geographers of the kind that has, in the last decade or two, refreshed our approach to a crucial period in Atlantic history. We were not far into the editorial processwhen it became obvious thatwe had toomuch for a single volume and sowewent to presswithTheNewEarlyModernNewfoundland: the Eighteenth Century, asNewfoundland Studies 17 (2) (2001), setting aside contributions that dealt with the centuries before 1700 for the present volume. This chronological somersault did not disguise an interpretative agenda; it was dictated simply by editorial happenstance. The eighteenth-century focus of the predecessor collection thus defined the historical end point for this one— but where would we start? The archaeology of the early Native people of Newfoundland and Labrador has already been covered in a special issue of this journal and another is in the works.We had no intention, however, of excluding either the discipline of archaeology or the topic of Native people from a collection devoted to the history of Newfoundland and Labrador from the time our part of the world first appears in the documentary record. This ambition posed a conundrum which the editor would have escaped, had he been content to work on the early history of any other part of the New World. How dowe relate the colony that the Norse briefly established in the early eleventh century with renewed European interest in Newfoundland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?Or to put it anotherway,what is “earlymodern” aboutVinland and the L’Anse aux Meadows site, the historical significance of which Birgitta Wallace clarifies in her opening article? Archaeologists, in particular, have challenged facile distinctions between “late medieval” and “earlymodern”; but there is

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