Sometimes our Curators find unexpected items in donations to the Museum Collections. What at first may look like it falls under one discipline, like Archaeology, may in fact fall under another discipline entirely! Learn about one neat example in this video with Curator of Archaeology Dave Finch.
Can you get rocket fuel from water? Join Science Communicator Rhianna in the Explore Science Zone to conduct some hydrogen electrolysis and learn about rockets!
Catch Forward to the Moon in the Planetarium this summer!
You may be familiar with large, round, vinyl records for playing music, but do you know what was used to play recorded music before that?
Join Learning Facilitator Erin in this video from outside the Ukrainian Booksellers and Publishers Ltd storefront in the Museum’s Winnipeg 1920 Cityscape to learn more.
The Criddle family made money in all sorts of different ways, from farming, to community service, to handcrafts! In this video Collections Technician of Human History, Cortney Pachet shows us some of the beautiful mother of pearl inlay work done by Evelyn and Stewart Criddle.
By David Finch, Curator of Archaeology
I lived in Yellowknife for ten years where the seasons are definitely pronounced. Downtown Yellowknife wraps around a small lake and I used to shop at stores on the other side. Shopping in winter was easier because I didn’t have to go around the lake – I could just walk across the ice. For the rest of the year, I faced a longer trek to reach my destination.
There is a concept in science called the seasonal round, which is basically how a group lives at different times of the year. Note that I did not say “in all four seasons” because that’s a Western idea of time – one traditional Cree view of the year has six seasons.
Regardless, humans and animals follow seasonal cycles that we see reflected in archaeological sites. Summer fish camps are different from fall hunting sites, and both are different from winter trapping cabins.
Image: A museum diorama of seasonal Anishnaabe campsites demonstrates the concept of a seasonal round. ©Manitoba Museum
Archaeologists also follow a seasonal round – it’s hard to dig in frozen ground or to survey when there is snow. In Manitoba, the season for fieldwork is often from May to October, with the winter months spent writing reports.
Spring break-up creates challenges for getting around, so it’s the perfect time for reports and a pot of tea. ©David Finch/Manitoba Museum
Accessing the country near Hudson’s Bay is a lot easier with snow machines. ©David Finch/Manitoba Museum
This summertime focus affects our mobility: recorded sites tend to be near highways and shorelines because most fieldwork is done during summer from trucks and boats. Ancient access was different, and winter sites might be in what we now write off as bogs.
One way around these problems is to think broadly about how, where, and when we can explore the land: oral history and traditional land use can help predict where sites may be (and where we should dig); underwater archaeology and remote sensing can reveal hidden sites; and making community connections and getting to know the land in all seasons can also point us in the right direction.
Lakes and rivers are like highways, both in ancient times and for archaeologists. ©David Finch/Manitoba Museum
Doing community-based fieldwork in Labrador (working in fall means fewer bugs. ©David Finch/Manitoba Museum
Did you know that roughly 2.5 million (86%) of the Museum’s 2.9 million artifacts are part of the Archaeology collection? Containing objects dating from the last ice age through thousands of years of Indigenous history and the arrival and settlement of Europeans in Manitoba, the collection represents over 12,000 years of Manitoba’s history. Visit today to explore the Archaeology collection and all the stories it has to tell.
Spotting a shooting star can be a pretty exciting experience. Join Planetarium Astronomer Scott Young at our Space Rocks exhibit to learn about some of the best meteor showers of the year – one of which is coming up later this month!
Visit the Science Gallery, where you can check out the oldest rock you’ll ever touch!
August brings the return of some planets to the evening sky, the most famous meteor shower of the year, and longer nights than we’ve seen for a couple of months. The Milky Way is on full display, offering an unforgettable view from a dark, moonless sky. Unfortunately all of these benefits will likely be offset by smoke in the air from forest fires across Canada, which has become a fixture of summertime observing for the last several years.
The annual Perseid meteor shower is the most famous meteor shower of the year, although it is not the best one of the year. Its occurrence in August during summer vacation likely makes it more accessible than the much better Geminids, which occur in mid-December. For a complete rundown on the Perseid meteor shower, check out this blog post.
2024 is a good year for the Perseids, since the peak time occurs with the Moon out of the sky. The thing about meteor showers is, they peak in the few hours before dawn for any given location. So to see the Perseids at their best, you want to observe from about 1:30 a.m. to dawn. There will be almost no meteors before midnight – you might see one or two, and the ones you do see will likely be bright ones, but it won’t be much of a “shower” unless you stay up all night.
To observe the Perseids, get away from city lights. Light pollution will wash out the fainter meteors, and there are a lot more faint meteors than bright ones. Bring a reclining lawn chair and blanket to ward off the early-morning chill, and set up facing the darkest part of the sky (or straight up, if you’re in a nice dark spot). Turn off your electronic devices and your car’s lights – any stray light will make it hard to see the meteors for you and anyone near you. The meteors only last a second or two, so you need to watch the sky continuously – literally, don’t blink or you’ll miss it.
You can also try and take pictures of meteors – set up your camera on a tripod and take a bunch of time exposures of the sky. If you’re lucky, a meteor will happen while you’re taking a picture.
We’d love to show your Perseid pics on Dome@Home, our online astronomy show. Send them to space@manitobamuseum.ca and then tune in to our August 28th show at 7 p.m. Central on the Museum’s Facebook and YouTube channels.
Finally, some planets are visible in the evening sky! Barely…
Mercury is still on the evening side of the sky, but in August it sets just after the Sun and so isn’t visible for Canadian viewers. Folks farther south still have have a chance to catch it early in the month, low in the west just after sunset.
Venus has appeared in the evening sky, although like Mercury it is still low in the sky; only its great brightness allows it to be spotted very low soon after sunset. The thin crescent moon is nearby on August 5th.
Mars rises about 2 a.m. local time in the northeast, inconspicuous compared to nearby Jupiter and both the Pleaides and Hyades star clusters. Mars and Jupiter pass less than half a degree apart on the morning of August 14th; see the Sky Calendar entry below for details.
Jupiter is the brightest “star” in the eastern sky after midnight, outshining all the visible stars as it cruises through the stars of Taurus. The waning crescent Moon is nearby on the morning of August 27.
Saturn rises about 11 p.m. local time early in the month, and moves into the south by dawn. The ringed planet reaches opposition on September 8, so it’s coming into its best viewing position for the year. The rings are only tilted about 4 degrees to our line of sight, making them appear very thin from our point of view. The nearly-full Moon is to Saturn’s left on the evening of the 21st.
Click on highlighted dates for a star chart showing the view!
Aug 4: New Moon
Aug 11 – Aug 12 (morning sky): Best viewing for the annual Perseids meteor shower; see featured article above. Decent rates should occur the morning before and after as well.
Aug 12 (evening sky): First Quarter Moon
Aug 14 (morning sky): Jupiter and Mars are close together in the morning sky, separated by less than the size of the Full Moon. They’re still pretty close the morning before and after this date.
Aug 19: Full Moon
Aug 20-21 (after midnight into morning sky): The waxing gibbous Moon is to the left of and slightly above Saturn. The two are only about 3 degrees (6 Full Moon diameters) apart, fitting easily into the same binocular field-of-view.
Aug 26: Last Quarter Moon
Aug 27 (morning sky): The waning crescent Moon is above Jupiter, rising together in the morning sky about 1 a.m. local time in the morning sky. Mars is below and to the left, forming a not-quite-right triangle. The red supergiant star Aldebaran is to Jupiter’s right along with the Hyades star cluster, with the Pleaides above them all. The morning rising of these star clusters remind us that winter is coming.
Aug 28 (morning sky): The Moon, Mars, and Jupiter form a very squashed triangle pointing downwards in the eastern sky before dawn.
Aug: 29 (morning sky): By this morning the Moon has moved farther on, still forming a rough line with Mars and Jupiter in the early morning sky.
Sometimes objects come in to the Archaeology lab that aren’t really artifacts, but are still interesting in their own right. This happened this past spring when volunteers in the Archaeology department came across some curious objects while processing artifacts. I had asked them to go through a donation made by the Criddle family, and among the arrowheads and scrapers were two weird little blobs that none of us could figure out. Until recently, that is.
The Criddle family came to Manitoba in 1882, and they had a property near Wawanesa that was like a little piece of England on the Prairies. They donated a large collection to the Museum that included everything from photographs to furnishings. (The Museum has covered their collection several times in our social media.) It turns out that the donation included some archaeological artifacts that were collected almost incidentally. Like a lot of farming families, the Criddles picked up artifacts and other objects that they came across in their fields, and these eventually made their way to the Archaeology lab.
The students volunteering in my lab are just learning about Manitoba archaeology. They’re fast learners, and they are getting a sense of how to sort cigar boxes full of bric-a-brac into organized piles of ancient tools, bone and shell, and so forth. In this collection they found two irregular cylinders of what looked like stony or metallic material. These were non-magnetic, so at first we thought they might be lead scrap or maybe furnace slag. That didn’t explain their irregular-but-oddly-identical appearances. They looked like they might fit together, but fit together into what?
Two mysterious objects found in the Criddle collection.
The objects almost look like they had little legs…
Let’s jump ahead in time a bit. A few weeks ago, Museum staff were working with our new pXRF instrument. That bit of alphabet soup stands for portable X-ray fluorescence, which is a non-destructive technique to determine which elements are in an object. The instrument emits X-rays which contact the target object and then create secondary x-rays, the frequencies of which can be matched to the elements present. The Museum is using our pXRF instrument for research in all of our departments and also to analyze objects under conservation. (We can also do analysis for other researchers for a fee.)
The results came back: a lot of iron, a bit of sulfur… and no lead. We scratched our heads and then it dawned on us that looked a lot like pyrite. Joe Moysiuk, our Curator of Geology and Palaeontology, suggested that our blobs could be ancient shells that had been fossilized and replaced with pyrite. We took a closer look and the two pieces articulated, just like part of a shell. Joe took another look and suggested they might be from Baculites, a type of straight-shelled ammonite that went extinct around the same time as did the dinosaurs. Imagine a squid-like critter with a long, straight, segmented shell behind it.
Baculites segments (particularly the larger ones) are sometimes called “buffalo stones.” These figure in the stories of Indigenous peoples of the Plains, such as the Blackfoot who call them iniskim. The fossil segments have articulation points that look like heads and legs, and resemble little buffalo. As a result, they have a spiritual connection to the larger animals and were used to call them. I am unsure if something similar existed on the Manitoba plains but I suspect that it did. If anyone is willing to share old stories, please drop me a line.
I can’t say if these little fossils were collected or used by Indigenous people in southwestern Manitoba. They definitely stood out as something unusual and were picked up by the Criddles. For me, these are also ecofacts – objects found at archaeological sites that are not made by humans but still tell you things about the landscape. They opened my eyes to questions of palaeontology and ethnography that I otherwise might not have looked into.
Every field, and every object in that field, can tell a story.
A segment of a Baculites fossil from the Cretaceous era, collected near Brandon and now in the Museum’s Palaeolontology collection.
The Museum has a rich collection of Chinese-Canadian artifacts that have been donated over many decades.
Manitoba Chinese Historical Society Collection
One of the largest donations, comprising 51 artifacts, came in 2005 from the Manitoba Chinese Historical Society (1987-2005). It includes everything from hats and shoes to lanterns, tea canisters, and even an acupuncture kit. Their archival collection was donated to the Archives of Manitoba.
Since then, the Museum’s collection has continued to grow, showcasing the complexity and variety of Chinese- Canadian history and experience in Manitoba.
The Ong Collection
This collection, donated in 2022-2023, spans about 80 years and three generations. Chronologically it begins with the story of Yee Chung Yen, who came to Canada in 1917. His story was outlined in my previous blog, The Story of Yee Chung Yen.
Mr. Don Wing Ong came to Canada after fleeing Communist China for Hong Kong in 1949, and he befriended Yee Chung Yen in Portage la Prairie. Don’s wife Anne (Yu Kwan Ying) and son Bill immigrated some years later. Bill Ong attended Grant Park High School, and went on to get his medical degree from the University of Manitoba. He was an anesthesiologist, and was married to Dr. Virginia Fraser. For our May “First Friday” event, we premiered video interviews with Dr. Fraser and son Thomas Rempel-Ong, where they talked about the artifacts and family history.
Chinese Alcove Bed
We are also conducting research on a Chinese “alcove bed,” which was purchased in the 1950s by a Canadian UN delegate who worked in China. She eventually brought it back to Winnipeg. A volunteer researcher is providing translation and interpretation. This stunning bed, which includes an entrance room (alcove), dates to the 19th century. It is a wonderful entry point to talk about Chinese traditions and symbols, and helps us bring the world to Manitobans. Click here to see a recent video about this artifact.
Chinese Laundries in Winnipeg
We have also updated the story of Chinese laundries in our 1920 Winnipeg Cityscape gallery, which now features the Sing Wo laundry, formerly located on Euclid Ave. The exhibit delves into the true history of the laundry trade and the incredible workload this entailed. To quote King Ho, the late Winnipeg laundry owner, “Words cannot adequately express how painful the work is.”
Little Restaurants on the Prairies
The Museum is currently in early production of a new Prairie Perspectives video with a rural Manitoban Chinese restaurant. From the perspective of the owner, we will learn more about this widespread Prairie institution and the role it plays in local communities. The video will be available for viewing in our Prairies Gallery, and released on our YouTube channel.
And of course there is so much more to the complexity of Chinese-Canadian history, from the traditions of the 19th Century, to the early immigration to the Canadian West, the disgraceful Chinese Head Tax and Chinese Immigration Act, and the consequences of the Chinese Communist Revolution of the 1940s, including increased immigration to Canada. All of these historical events are, though vast in scope, linked to the individual lives of people who have enriched the province.
A meteor (a.k.a. falling star, shooting star) looks like a bright streak across the starry sky that lasts for a second or two before fading away. Most people believe they are rare enough that you should make a wish when you see one, but they are surprisingly common if you watch the sky a lot. On any given night with no Moon, if you get away from city lights and watch the sky continuously, you’ll see up to a half-dozen meteors per hour. Any light sources – the Moon, city lights, you phone – will reduce that number to near zero.
Each meteor you see is actually a tiny piece of dust about the size of a grain of sand which is burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Space isn’t empty, you see – it’s dusty, with all the dust leftover from the big construction job that was the formation of the solar system. As the Earth orbit the Sun, it plows through the dust at over 100,000 kilometers per hour. It’s a one-sided collision, and the poor speck of dust disintegrates in a flash of light that we can see from the ground as a meteor.
So far, so good – you can see these little specks of dust as they vaporize, and they pretty much occur randomly all the time, we just don’t usually notice. But, it turns out that space isn’t evenly dusty. There are spots, just like in your house, that have more dust than others. In my house, these dust bunnies congregate under the furniture and anyplace the air vents push them; in the solar system these dust bunnies remain where they were shed, in the orbital paths of comets. The solar system is crisscrossed by trails of dust left behind by various comets (and a few asteroids). If the Earth’s orbit intersects one of those trails, we will fly through an interplanetary dust bunny every year around the same time. That’s a meteor shower.
The name “meteor shower” makes you think you can see a lot more meteors than on other nights. But here’s the thing: “a lot” can mean different things. Forty times the normal rate sounds like a lot, until you remember it’s forty times about one meteor per hour. There are over a hundred meteor showers catalogued, but there are only a couple of meteor showers a year that produce more than forty meteors an hour. Even during an official meteor “shower”, you can probably only expect to see a half-dozen meteors per hour, and that’s under perfect skies with your eyes watching the sky 100% of the time.
So, most meteor showers don’t produce many meteors; that’s the bad news. The good news is, the Perseids in August is one of them, which makes them probably the most famous meteor shower of all. And, in 2024 the Moon will be out of the sky during the crucial morning hours. If you can get away from city lights under a clear, dark sky, you might see up to 60 meteors an hour – one a minute – in the early morning hours of August 12.
That’s pretty specific timing, but luckily the Perseids “dust bunny” is more than one day wide. The Earth actually enters the outer edge of it in late July, and each morning the rates will increase until the peak on the 11th-12th. So, we have several chances to see a decent Perseids display this year.
The key point to remember is that all meteor showers are best between about 1:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. local time. Pre-midnight observing might be 1/10 or less of the morning rates. Really, you have to stay up all night to see this.
To get the best view, get as far away from city lights as practical, and set up a reclining lawn chair or blanket so you can lean back and see as much of the sky as possible. Keep all the lights around you off, especially if you are in a park of other spot with other observers. One peek at your phone will shut off the natural night vision of your eyes for up to ten minutes, so you really need to avoid looking at any lights. (If you need to keep your car running, cover the headlights with a blanket or something so you don’t blast the whole park with your lights!) If you have any lights nearby, put them behind you out of your view, and just watch the sky. You don’t need a telescope or binoculars – in fact, those instruments restrict your field of view so much that you probably won’t see any meteors through them at all. The meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, and they only last a second or two – literally, don’t blink or you can miss them.
You can take pictures of meteors, but it involves a little luck, and some understanding of your camera. If you have a DSLR or mirrorless camera, you can put it on a tripod and set your exposure manually for something like 5 or 10 seconds – you’ll get a lot of pictures of stars, but if you’re lucky a meteor will happen while you’re shooting, and it will show up in one picture.
If you’re using your phone camera, you might need to download a better camera app than the one your phone came with – check out the app store for one that is designed for night or sky photography. The same tactic applies – take lots of pictures, and hope you catch one. Make sure the light from your camera doesn’t interfere with your vision, though – just take the pictures now, and look at them later.
One thing to watch for: satellites. There are piles of satellites that will show up in your images as streaks of light. You can tell satellites by the trail being the same brightness and thickness throughout; meteors tend to start faint and narrow, get brighter and wider, and then trail out again.
While technically there are other meteor showers in July and August, in practice these are not noticeable to the average observer and are scientific designations only. They’re named after the constellation or star that the meteors appear to radiate from, but most of them produce a meteor every couple of hours or so – not even a spritzing, let alone a shower. Even the bigger South Delta Aquariid meteor shower, which peaks in late July, only produces about 5 meteors an hour at best. If you are interested in these minor meteor showers, there is backyard science that can be done by tracking them with a camera, though; visit the International Meteor Organization for some great information on getting deeper into the science of meteor observing.
tl;dr: The morning of August 12th between 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. you will probably see quite a few meteors. The morning before and after, you’ll still see a good number. The rest of the summer, you’ll hardly see any, but you might see one anytime you are looking at the stars.
