History of the St Lawrence Iroquoians

Who knew the fate of the St Lawrence Iroquoians -- the people whom Jacques Cartier was welcomed by in 1535 at Stadacona and Hochelaga and who were not there when Champlain et al began arriving in the early 1600s -- was news?

The Globe and Mail recently had a long story by Deborah Baic about new techniques and new ideas in archaeology, and how they are reshaping this question. I must admit I don't see the debate being advanced far from when Bruce Trigger and others were discussing this question in the 1970s, but I like seeing public attention to complicated historical questions, so....  Great photos in the digital version of the story -- if it is available to you

Book Notes: A Synthesis of Far Northeastern Archeology, created with indigenous sponsorship and participation.

 

I missed this when it was first posted at the Canadian Museum of History blog last November: an announcement of a volume marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Mercury Series, a publication of the Museum in cooperation with University of Ottawa Press. 

The Mercury Series is internationally respected, particularly for the archaeological monographs it has published  

And the volume in question is significant too: The Far Northeast: 3000 BP to Contact. The archaeology of far northeastern North American (roughly the Atlantic provinces) seems to be deeper, older, and more resistant to simple explanations than one might imagine (e.g., the elaborate 7500 year old burial mound at L'Anse Amour, Labrador, on the Strait of Belle Isle -- who built that then?) This multi-authored collection is being saluted as an important synthesis -- and it only goes back 3000 years.  

Worth noting:  According to volume editor Kenneth Holyoke, “The book is largely based on a two-day marathon session we organized at the 2019 Canadian Archaeological Association meeting in Québec City, and it was sponsored by the Grand Conseil de la Nation Waban-Aki.”  

Indigenous voices are included as contributors and supporters of this project. The northeastern Indigenous communities were at the forefront of contact with Europeans. The book begins with a text by the illustrator of the beautiful book cover, Wolastoqey artist Austin Paul.

History of the Comox fish weirs

Hakai, a magazine about coastal things, reports on the remarkable archaeology project that has been going on for the last twenty years around Comox harbour on British Columbia's Salish Sea. What the researchers are recording and analyzing are the remains of long buried stakes -- there may be 200,000 of them around the Courtney River estuary -- that still mark out the shapes of an enormously elaborate set of fish weirs. They comprise "the largest unstudied archaeological feature yet found on the Pacific Northwest coast" and testify to "an immense, highly coordinated, and sophisticated fish trap system, the largest such system discovered in North America, if not the world."

The whole article is worth reading, but the basic takeaway is of the richness and sophistication of the societies that live along the British Columbia coast before epidemics and colonization swept them away barely 150 years ago.

History of art, very old art

The New York Times has a long report on new studies of the Shigir Idol, a carved wooden monument found east of the Ural mountains of Russia in 1890, and now reliable confirmed to be about 12,500 years old -- that is, when the area was still deglaciating and the larch tree it was carved from had barely gained a foothold locally.  It is by far the world's oldest piece of wooden statuary, more than twice as old as Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids.

As its researchers point out, ancient societies that worked in stone or ivory have a much better chance of being respected for their art and culture than those, particularly hunting/gathering peoples, who would work with wood or cloth. The Shigir Icon, "a nine foot totem pole" with multiple carved faces and other ritual marks, nicely proves the point.

The story also has a nice closing touch about who gets to do archaeology.

“What do you think is the hardest thing to find in the Stone Age archaeology of the Urals?”
A pause: Sites?
“No,” he said, sighing softly. “Funding.”

History of global trade

Long ago and far away

A recent archaeological identification from several sites in the Brooks Range of Alaska looks innocuous: a few bright blue glass beads. Beads are a routine item in European-indigenous trade, no?

Yes.  Except these blue beads are reliably dated (from organic materials attached to them) to the mid-to-late 1400s. They evidently made their way from a factory in Venice, Italy, to the Brooks Range of north-central Alaska before the first non-Viking Europeans crossed the Atlantic, let alone ventured inland.  The berry-sized beads most likely travelled the Silk Road from the Mediterranean into Asia, then north in Siberia, and then along indigenous trade routes across the Bering Strait and into Alaska.

The authors of the paper, archaeologists Michael Kunz from the University of Alaska Museum of the North and Robin Mills from the Bureau of Land Management, suspect the beads were trade goods that, after passing through China’s Silk Road, eventually made their way through Siberia and eventually into Alaska via the Bering Strait. If confirmed, it would be “the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent,” the authors wrote in their study.

Ten examples of the beads have been found. Some of the discoveries, indeed, are more than sixty years old and are attributed to pioneering Canadian archaeologist William Irving, but were undated until recently. 

Selma Barkham, explorer, 1927-2020 RIP

The Globe and Mail has a very good obituary article on Selma Barkham.  I was going to say "Selma Barkham, historian," and she's entitled to the descriptor, but really she was kind of sui generis -- as the article makes clear. A remarkable life.

I recall seeing her once at a conference in Ottawa, describing the very detailed information she had on a 1565 Basque shipwreck in Red Bay, Labrador, and asking if anyone in the room had the kind of marine archaeological expertise she needed. At the end of the session, I watched Robert Grenier, Parks Canada's head of marine archaeology, heading for the front of the room as if shot from a cannon. I presume that was the start of the excavation of the San Juan and its preservation at Red Bay, a historic site I am happy to have visited.

Photo credit: Michael Barkham, via G&M.

History of the Franklin archaeology

The CBC News website recently ran a story on last year's marine archaeology work at the HMS Erebus site -- the most successful investigation of the Franklin wrecks in recent seasons, due to favourable weather.

Over a three-week period in late August and September, members of the underwater archeology team made 93 dives and spent about 110 hours underwater at the Erebus site.
"It was by far our most successful season and we're pretty excited," said Bernier.
The experience was in marked contrast to their efforts the year before, which were severely hampered by miserable weather.
In 2019, however, the weather was "sublime," senior underwater archeologist Ryan Harris said in an interview.
"One of our biggest challenges is just … environmental conditions in the central Arctic. We can come up with the most detailed, well-laid plans and they can be frustrated by very unco-operative ice conditions and weather," he said.
"Finally in 2019 … [it] all came to fruition. It's extremely gratifying for the entire team."

Perhaps the best thing about the article is the beautifully spooky Parks Canada photograph above, where you see the diveboats and then gradually the ship itself lurking beneath. 
..

Peopling the Americas

A stop on the Kelp Highway?

Smithsonian Magazine for January offers "The Fertile Shore," which starts with archaeologists from the University of Victoria working along the green shores of British Columbia's Inland Passage, which increasingly "had to be" part of the passageway the first human inhabitants of the Americas worked their way into the continent. 

But as it goes on, the story focusses on just how fiendishly difficult it is to draw firm conclusions on these questions, as archaeological finds and DNA analyses keep producing more data in search of a comprehensive narrative.

The story explores how  modern sea levels have risen hundreds of metres since the last glacial maximum, but the land freed from ice has sprung back just as fast, so that there are water's-edge sites today that were water's edge sites "then."  It gets into the "Kelp Highway," the "Beringian Standstill Hypothesis," the Hakai Institute, gene flow analysis, beetle fossils, and the Yana River finds in western Siberia.  Complicated stuff.  But it gets more and more persuasive, that as the ice melted, the ancestors of the First Nations were there  --were here -- as the grass began to grow and the rivers began to run.

Image: from Smithsonian Magazine

North American prehistory -- keeps getting older

Know how these differ from Clovis points?  Well, they do.

Recent data from an archaeological site in Idaho sets out new evidence for a "pre-Clovis"  (ie, more than 12,000-13,000 years before the present) presence in western North America.

"Clovis" is largely a style of tool-making, with examples found quite widely in North American excavations back to 13,000 BP. It was long considered the oldest evidence of human presence in the Americas. There are now also some genetic data from Clovis-associated remains, which confirm Clovis people shared DNA links with other early North Americans and also with Asian/Siberian forebears.

A "Clovis" presence was compatible (just barely, maybe) with an "ice-free" deglaciated corridor east of the Rocky Mountains that could have given the first Clovisans access from Beringia and Asia into North America as the ice sheets began to recede. But human evidence south of the ice 16,000 years ago is too early for any "ice-free" corridor. So finds that date earlier strengthen the likelihood of a coastal or sea-borne migration into the Americas coming first, followed by dispersal inland from points south of the ice-sheet barrier. The archaeologist at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, notes that the site might have been accessed by a route opening inland from the Pacific Coast more or less where the lower Columbia River now flows.

I made a documentary, 'Peopling the Americas,' for CBC Radio Ideas as long ago as 1989, and even then the best glaciological opinions I could find were dubious about an ice-free corridor as early as the archaeologists needed, and intrigued by the likelihood of a coastal migration, along a Pacific coast that might have resembled 20th century Greenland -- cold, but habitable and traversable.  Nice to see the evidence grow.

Image: from Nature.com.

HMS Terror: new video from inside

John Franklin and all his men are still dead. The how (entrapment by ice, followed eventually by starvation) and the why (bad luck, failure to understand the risks, overconfidence, etc.) remain well known.  The "Franklin mystery" mostly comes down to small details.

Still, it is impressive to see how much of the small detail seems likely to be teased out in the coming years, with the expedition's sunken ships now located in pretty good condition, and with new reports coming in from Parks Canada on just how much material awaits investigation aboard the Terror:  possibly even notebooks, lettters, charts, and papers preserved in their cabinets in the cold water.

Here is Parks Canada's report on the 2019 exploration season, blessed with good weather this time, and here is an appreciation by Franklinist Russell Potter.

Image: Parks Canada.

Urban archaeology in Toronto UPDATED

A couple of years ago, a condominium construction dig in the high density neighbourhood at the intersection of Bathurst Street and Fort York Boulevard in downtown Toronto unearthed the remains of an early 19th century cargo ship sunk or buried at that site when it was wharfside Lake Ontario.

Since then the remains of the hull have been stored at nearby Fort York, and now a team of marine archaeologists from Texas A&M University are in town to analyze them.

Carolyn Kennedy, a nautical archaeologist from Texas A&M and team leader, said the cargo ship likely would have moved goods across Lake Ontario as the Town of York, as Toronto was then known, grew in size. ...It tells us about the very beginnings of the city of York, the city of Toronto. These merchant vessels probably would have been the bread and butter of trade at that time. They would have been like the trucks that we have now," she said.

Update, June 16:  Fort York will host a presentation by the archeological team on the ship remains and their project.  Fort York Visitor Centre (250 Fort York Blvd, Toronto), Thursday, June 21 6.00 pm.

Terry Glavin on British Columbia history

PM Trudeau and Tsilhqot'in representatives

Writer Terry Glavin, always an interesting -- and unpredictable -- writer on British Columbia and much else, has a recent couple of notable pieces of historical journalism in Maclean's, where he is a contributor.

One is a solid backgrounder on the Chilcotin/Tsilhqot’in war of 1864, which led to the hanging of six First Nations leaders Lhats’as?in, Biyil, Tilaghed, Taqed, Chayses, and Ahan. This was the event for which the government of Canada formally apologized in the Canadian Parliament.

The shame and disgrace at the heart of the Chilcotin War’s legacy occurred shortly after 8 a.m. on Aug. 15, 1864, when the war leader Lhats’as?in and several of his comrades agreed to enter the encampment of William Cox, the leader of an expeditionary force of several dozen armed men dispatched by the just-appointed Governor Frederick Seymour, to talk truce. Instead, Lhats’as?in and his warriors were arrested and put in chains.

Seeking a little background on the Chilcotin war at the time of the apology, I was taken aback by how little standard references -- from Wikipedia to the Canadian Encyclopedia  -- had to say. If you still need some of the details behind the apology, this story by Glavin and Maclean's is a place to start.

The other Glavin story covers the remarkable discovery of a set of preserved footprints in Heiltsuk territory on Calvert Island on the west coast of British Columbia.  The 29 footprints, apparently of a man, woman, and child, have been determined to be 13,000 years old. Footprints!

These prints now become part of the growing body of evidence sustaining the theory that movements along the then ice-choked British Columbia coast were among the very earliest human presence in the Americas. Glavin tells the story well.  I was sorry, however, that he framed it as a conflict: the suggestive wisdom of indigenous traditions about early presence against the ignorance of pigheaded scientists.

In fact, the Simon Fraser University archaeologist Knut Fladmark has been arguing for decades that a coastal migration down the west coast of North America, almost certainly using small boats and relying on marine resources  (for an analogy, consider the adaptation of the Inuit to the glacier-bound coasts of Greenland and the Canadian north) was more plausible as a first entry route than the "ice-free corridor" route east of the Rockies. I interviewed Fladmark 25 years ago on the subject, and advances in underwater archaeology, geology, and glaciology continue to shore up his arguments.

So there has been convergence rather than than conflict between indigenous knowledge and scientific thinking for quite a while on this question.  Still, a couple of interesting and well-sourced pieces of historical journalism.

Image:  from Maclean's

Excavating Democracy

It has long been one of John Ralston Saul's talking points in his case that Canada has abjectly neglected, if not actually denied, the moment in 1848-49 when responsible government, the foundation of Canadian democracy, was secured. Go to Montreal, he would say, and you will find that the site of Parliament where it was achieved, the Parliament thereupon burned down by an anti-democratic mob, is a parking lot.

Well, maybe some people listened. The terrific Montreal museum Pointe-à-Callières has been conducting archaeological excavations at the parking lot since the summer, and the finds are terrific, it seems.

Update, October 27:  Ken Dewar comments from Halifax:

Re your item of Oct. 18th, Excavating Democracy, the excavations are very interesting, but isn't the real "abject neglect" the failure to note Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia in February 1848 as the real moment "when responsible government, the foundation of Canadian democracy, was secured"?

Thirty-five years of residence in Halifax turns one into a bit of a Nova Scotia nationalist.

Hmm.  I guess it is no excuse to say I only had five years in Nova Scotia, and it wasn't enough.

On the other hand, good to recall that Province House is still right there for Nova Scotia to admire, not waiting for a few shards to be recovered from the dirt.

A timeline on responsible government from the Nova Scotia legislature website.

Image:Toronto Star

An archaeological discovery unlikely to hold up

probably just some bones, nothing to see here

News reports of a human presence in North America 130,000 years ago, as evidence by an archaeological site near San Diego, California, strike me as likely not to lead to a rewriting of American prehistory.

No doubt the archaeologists are following the evidence before them, when they interpret an assemblage of mastodon bones and chipped stones dated to 130,000 BP as evidence of human activity in breaking the bones.

But you know, if they were breaking bones in San Diego 130,000 years ago, they must have come from somewhere, and they must have left some evidence of themselves.  And neither of those conditions seem likely to be confirmed.  So the rule that broken bones and broken stones together do not constitute proof of human presence seems likely to be borne out.

Maybe more striking than this one-day story are the jeering, sneering racist comments that follow the CBC's online news item. One might think a suggestion that the indigenous people of North America have been here at least ten times as long as had been conjectured would increase their stature and their title as First Peoples.  Of course, in the world of online anonymous commenting, it's the opposite.

Photo: San Diego Natural History Museum, via CBC news

Who can show the artifacts of Erebus and Terror?

Pretty sure that's a Canadian archaeologist at work

Dean Beeby, for CBC News, reports on the first exhibition of materials from the newly found Franklin shipwrecks -- in England, at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, even though the exhibition is curated by the Canadian Museum of History

The first major exhibition of artifacts from the sunken Arctic wreck of HMS Erebus is planned during Canada's 150th birthday next year — but Canadians will have to travel to Britain to see it....

The exhibition is scheduled to be presented at the Canadian Museum of History only in 2018. -- a year after the British display. As Beeby notes,

Sending upward of 22 HMS Erebus objects to Greenwich for next year's exhibition is also fraught, because Canada requires an export permit signed by the owner or owners — something still in flux and potentially in dispute.

... because Nunavut and the Inuit assert their own claims to hold and present the Franklin artifacts.

At Visions of The North, Franklin scholar Russell Potter calls Beeby's story "misleading" and declares there is no problem giving primacy to the National Maritime Museum:

[T]hat's actually to Canada's benefit, as they will be the centerpiece of a series of events in London, co-ordinated by Canada House, marking this important anniversary there.

Canadians, I suspect, will be able to estimate quite accurately just about how much the British will care about a Canadian 150th anniversary event.

Some years ago, I too would have understood the Franklin expedition as a perfectly British disaster, organized by the British Navy for its own purposes, without any participation by the provinces of British North America.  But the search for and discovery of the Erebus and the Terror were driven and directed by Canada and became something of a national endeavour. The program also relied heavily on Inuit information and support, and in the process the Franklin expedition has become a significant episode in making Inuit history better known and appreciated.

The original expedition may have been British, that is, but the discovery has been uniquely Canadian. The handful of artifacts hurriedly salvaged from the Erebus in 2014 will hardly be the definitive exhibition of Franklin finds, but it remains deeply inappropriate that their first formal, curated showing should be outside Canada. Particularly since, as Visions of The North makes clear:

As items from the navy of a nation, these newly-recovered Franklin relics would have been the unquestioned property of Her Majesty's Government -- but in the 1997 memorandum of understanding between the UK and Canada, the UK transfers all claims in the wrecks and their contents to Canada (an exception being made only for any gold found on the wrecks) as soon as they are positively identified.

Finding Erebus and Terror was a remarkable feat of Canadian exploration, and their exploration will be a great event in Canadian underwater archaeology. Canada should be starting the exhibition here, probably in Gjoa Haven as well as Ottawa, not sending it overseas as some misplaced courtesy.

Shouldn't all the Franklin searchers be on the same side?

Turns out that when the privately-founded Arctic Research Foundation, which has been a junior partner to Parks Canada and the Canada Coast Guard in the search for the Franklin ships but tends to be up front when credit is handed out, located HMS Terror last month ... they did not tell their Parks Canada colleagues for a week.

The report by Tom Spears of the Ottawa Citizen last week suggests that the ARF wanted to get its own video and its own PR prepared before bringing in the professionals from Parks Canada. Parks Canada divers were therefore prevented from examining the wreck until shortly before ice brought the diving season to a close.

Someone in the government of Canada needs to take the Franklin searchers firmly in hand and tell them to get their act together.  This nasty beggar-my-neighbour, win-the-media competition among the various parties is clearly bad for science, bad for history, and bad for Canada's reputation for Arctic management.

Some of this backbiting and credit-hogging came out last year.  Looks like it has not gone away.

The Valour and the Terror

Terror's helm, photographed by Arctic Research Foundation

I was getting sceptical about Search for Franklin II, where the PR seemed to be endless but the actual research plan seemed to be meagre and cloaked in confidentiality.

But they did it.  They found HMS Terror, and with it puzzles to delight another century of Franklinologists.  (How did it get there? Why wasn't it crushed? Who?  Until when? And who will seize the credit in the end?) Chapeaux to them all, as the Tour cyclists say., and particularly to the Parks Canada people, who do this work even when it is not newsworthy.

The best place to follow this may be Russell Potter's Visions of the North blog, already on it -- and with comments by David Woodman.  The Guardian Online seems to have news exclusives -- but these days googling "Terror" on a news website doesn't lead very efficiently to the Franklin ship.

Norse site at Pointe Rosee -- on its last legs?

CBC News had a feature last night on this summer's excavations at Point Rosee, Nfld, the ones prompted by innovative satellite analysis that suggested a possible Norse site there.

The CBC team had a lot of beautiful landscape and seascape photography, and a great interview with longtime Norse archaeologist Birgitta Wallace, who was placidly sceptical about the prospects.  The whole story was dancing around what it really did not want to report: that Point Rosee is not panning out.

Fair enough. Archaeologists have to go look, and you don't always find what might have been.  But with National Geographic and Nova on it from the start, this has definitely been a case of over-promise and under-deliver so far, and all the location filming in the world can't change that.

Back to school roundup

Active History returns from hiatus with Alan MacEachern going deep on Bering Land Bridge theory -- and, it seems, the penchant of Canadian history textbooks for publicizing somewhat cranky versions of human origins in the Americas.

Borealia continues its survey of new books in early Canadian history, including The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, by Ann M. Little, who is also American blogger Historiann -- and lately too caught up in American politics  (national and academic) to blog much about history.

Economic Principals asks if there is room in the academy for history of economics -- and notes a couple of worthwhile Canadian initiatives in the field.

The Vancouver Sun interviews historian Daniel Francis, who, in presenting the history of his hometown, offers us the concept of the "wilderburb."

"A wilderburb is a community situated at the interface between urban and wilderness, a community that combines the density of city living with direct access to the outdoors. The idea of a bear in your backyard, a very familiar phenomenon in North Vancouver, very much encapsulates the District’s identity."

We must have quite of few of those across Canada. I was thinking any community at some risk of being destroyed by forest fire would fit the definition.  But I don't know if the suburbs of Los Angeles should qualify.

John Lorinc on heritage preservation in the big city and the big bureaucracy

Writer John Lorinc puzzles out why a notable piece of Toronto urban history and archaeology will go unnoted.

There’s an elegant symmetry to the fact that a courthouse will rise on ground once occupied by the BME, an institution whose existence is linked directly to those most human cravings for freedom and justice [...].

Yet provincial officials appear to have ruled out options for either in situ preservation of the BME foundation, or some kind of memorial on the grounds of the courthouse. Why? Because of a long-standing policy that requires such buildings to be studiously neutral in design and free of any kind of political or partisan elements.