Posted on: Tuesday July 21, 2015
Just a few days after coming back from York Landing I was packing up the truck to make the drive back north, only this time I was going back to get my trowel dirty!
As you can imagine, the remnants of the fur trade are all over this fine country and while many of the big sites have been investigated there are hundreds of smaller posts scattered along the waterways just waiting for archaeologists to excavate and learn all about them.
This site was located by local archaeologist Keith Anderson after a forest fire had cleared out a lot of the vegetation, and coincidentally it’s less than 100m away from a post site that was excavated by provincial archaeologist Brian Smith in the 1990s.
Since this post is close to the eroding bank we decided to start work on it this summer. Fortunately for me, Keith and his clearing crew had already done the hard work of removing the dead trees before I arrived (yes, I’m spoiled!).
Image: Years of watching dad pack the car for camping helped me tetris all of my gear into the pan of the truck!
The site seen from the water.
When a burnt tree messes up your grid, cut it down!
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!
