Northern Exposure- Part 3

Boreal forest archaeology is very different from my experiences in the arctic, the biggest thing of course being the trees and massive roots that run through our excavation units. Root clippers quickly became my best friend, but when they fail there’s always the good old chainsaw to take care of a few stumps!

My crew worked hard to try and delineate the post, and half-way through our excavation we realized that the building was not oriented perfectly East-West, but rather on an angle of Northwest-Southeast to the shoreline. We were able to find some remnants of the exterior walls, and the floor boards were fairly well-preserved.

We didn’t find a ton of artifacts, but we also didn’t excavate the area immediately around the hearth (stone chimney) or the cellar. Perhaps next year we’ll find all the goodies! We did recover enough artifacts for me to get a sense of the date of occupation, it seems like late 18th century but I’ll have a better idea once the artifacts are cleaned up and processed in the lab.

Of course fieldwork is not all-work, I caught my first pickerel (delicious) and on one fishing trip witnessed how quickly a forest fire can spread (scary!). On my way back to Winnipeg I made sure to stop in Thompson to clean my filthy truck, and made a quick side trip to Pisew Falls (highly recommended, it’s gorgeous!).

My goals for this season were to determine the limits of the site, by identifying the walls of the post and any related features outside of visible structure, and to acquire enough artifacts to be able to figure out the date of the site. I want to know if it was occupied at the same time as the other nearby post, was it also HBC or their rivals the Northwest Company? There is much to learn from any new archaeological site, and this one will be no different!

Summer fieldwork has begun, which means many of us Curators are out and about conducting our research. My fieldwork has me working in Northern Manitoba, for the first time! I spent some time in the evenings writing up blog posts so I could post when I returned from the field, here’s the first installment.

My first trip north was mid-June with Kevin Brownlee (Curator of Archaeology) as we are working on a joint project that will have us partnering up with Parks Canada and heading out to York Factory National Historic Site this August. We wanted to connect with communities that used to reside at York Factory to talk about their connection to the coast, York Factory, and ask them how they’d like to see their part of Manitoba represented in our museum.

With the help of a very passionate local historian Flora Beardy*, we made an appointment with Chief and Council for York Factory First Nation in York Landing to start the discussion. They were receptive to the project and encouraged us to connect with folks working in the Implementation Office who were already compiling stories and information. They also informed us that many of their band members live in Churchill so it looks like I’ll finally get to go there too!

There are other communities we still need to meet with, but we’ve got the ball rolling and I’m excited to see how this all unfolds.

*Flora compiled and edited a number of oral histories with Robert Coutts and published ‘Voices from Hudson Bay: Cree Stories from York Factory’, a book I highly recommend.