Peter L. Storck is an archaeologist at the Royal Ontario Museum. I missed his Journey to the Ice Age when it appeared in 2004 (from UBC Press). It is an autobiography of his decades of studying the paleo-Indian presence in Ontario -- "paleo" meaning the very first people who moved into this part of the world as the glacial ice gradually retreated, to Barrie, to North Bay, to north of Timmins. It's also an account of a rigorous, complicated, and often unsuccessful research program aimed first at simply finding sites that have survived 10,000 years and more, then at extracting meaning from them.
One of the book's charms arises from Storck's acute sense of landscape. He constantly describes going to places I know well -- a farm near Alliston, a gully on the Escarpment near Hamilton, a hilltop just west of Blue Mountain -- and then imagining the paleo-landscape: tundra, cold lakes, shorelines and islands, migrating caribou herds.
Archaeologists often get cast as rugged, bearded guys in plaid shirts coming back with arrowheads. What a complex intellectually challenging discipline it actually is! Storck's book catches that.
