There's no shortage of wrong ideas about Maine's first inhabitants. But that's bound to change, thanks to a book recently published by Bruce Bourque, senior lecturer in anthropology at Bates. He is the primary author of "Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine" (University of Nebraska Press), a history of native Mainers from the earliest Paleo-Indians to the natives who greeted the European explorers.

The book sums up Bourque's Maine research to date. In 1970 he began an archaeological project on Penobscot Bay's Fox Islands that has surveyed more than 200 sites so far and excavated 35. Bourque is also chief archaeologist and curator of ethnology at the Maine State Museum.

"Twelve Thousand Years" sheds new light on the original Mainers — emphasizing, for instance, the sea's importance to later native cultures. (Bourque's expertise in that area was represented in a second notable publication this year, an article in the July 27 Science magazine about human impacts on coastal ecosystems that drew extensive press.)

"Twelve Thousand Years" challenges the image of pre-Colonial Indian history as static. Instead, Bourque says, it was complex and dynamic. Maine's first inhabitants were "human, and their communities ebbed and flowed in their numbers and shifted geographic relationships. And we haven't understood that until just recently."

Bourque notes that his students are curious about native Mainers. "From them I get repeatedly, 'Why don't they teach us this stuff in school?' And I say, 'Because my book isn't out yet,' " he laughs. "But my book is now out, so hopefully that will begin to change."