This Small Archaeological Site in Canada Could Rewrite Human History

history is um articulated through landscape and uh Manan Island also known as menines is also known as Spirit Island but also oawa Min is the place of the Odawa being the traditional territory of the Odawa and nnab there's Rich oral histories around um underwater beings that occupy the surrounding area of Manan Island there's oral histories of of under underwater tunnels that connect to certain places the name itself manin comes from ning which is the um anishnabe pronunciation of Manan manwan is the anglicized pronunciation of nading and that means the the den of the spirit so the place where the the spirit presents itself the village of sagua looks like many other rural communities at first glance except for an unusual null of quartsite rock on the outskirts of town Rising more than 100 ft above the nearby Waters of sagua bay rediscovered in Modern Times by archaeologist Thomas Lee in 1951 this rare quartsite outcropping makes chagua one of the most interesting archaeological sites in all the world and also one of the least understood so we're here at the start of the uh Trail the Historic Trail to the shua archaeological site and it is a national dark site as we mentioned this uh trail that you're going to be walking on goes several hundred meters up the hill and uh we'll be stopping at about 10 different points along the way so here we are at the uh the first stop or maybe the second stop on this historic walking tour this is all about the ancient Beach Terraces on manaul and Ireland and the sagua site and as I mentioned earlier as we go up the hill will be essentially walking back in time so we starting out down here at chnda Bay Lake hiron and right now we're nearly at the Ala level which is only maybe about 20 m above normal and then we'll be going up to the nipping and the Kora this is the top of the hill so we're only going to be going halfway up all of the various beet rdes uh on manat tulan but this is a kind of a way of geologically dating the sites and the people that lived on them long before modern technology and farming practices made hunting unnecessary for most people in this part of the world ancient peoples relied on one simple skill to stay alive the ability to create and use sharp edged tools made of stone for thousands of years Stone arrowheads spear points knives and scrapers were as essential for life as cars and grocery stores are today Paleo Indians made and used these items not just to hunt animals but to scrape hides clean to use for clothing and shelter to cut up meat after making a kill and to defend themselves against enemies but making sharp edged tools and weapons by hand using only what nature provides isn't easy only a few kinds of rock in the world have the right properties to be chipped into sharp blade-like shapes that hold an edge and resist shattering the Quartzsite null at chagua is one of the very best for this application and it's astonishingly rare that's why ancient peoples traveled to this site and used it for at least 450 Generations most of the bedrock in the sagua area and all of manit tulan Island in fact is Dolomite a sedimentary rock similar to Limestone Dolomite is completely useless for making weapons and Edge tools and this is why sagua with its astonishingly pure quartsite outcropping was such a valuable spot in ancient times no doubt skilled tool makers from miles around came to the null to make tools for themselves and as trade goods leaving a long Rich record going back into Antiquity most of the local court site is encased far beneath the soil and dolomite Bedrock of the modern-day landscape and is quite inaccessible but in chagua things are different thanks to a chance Ripple in The Rock when it first formed from liquid magma a hilock of Quartzsite pokes up through the surface where it's completely exposed Millennia ago when humans first discover this outcropping it changed everything for one simple reason chagua Quartzsite has just the right High silica content that allows it to be chipped in predictable and extremely sharp ways so manul and geology is basically B Dolomite and limestones and so it would be much younger than the the quartz site uh this is called shua quartz site but geologically it's the bar river formation it's also special in that it uh it's been recrystallized so sometime this this really old rock 1.3 billion years old and it's surrounded by Rock that's a few hundred million years old but it got distorted and twisted and pushed and it's made more glassy so it it fractures better and more consistently so we're here at the Aloma level now we're at what they consider to be the middle Woodland level this would be about 2,000 years old the water would be right at the foot of this little Ridge at that time and during that period uh the middle woodland people uh lived in this area and all across the region so we find sites in places like Karne Elsewhere on manolin all across this part of Canada the nanabi people uh lived in in wigwams they made Pottery so this is the first appearance of clay pots around that time now this particular installation just recognizes uh the indigenous use of of plants all virtually all plants were used uh for medicines for materials for uh cordages this plant is can be used to make rope and Twine and various other kinds of useful uh material so if you want to string up a deer you could take the bark and braid it together this is something called durap palasis it's not a widespread plant but it's a very useful plant here you see an Archer bows and arrows were important derap plastus could be used to make uh bow strings so we're proceeding up a slope here that is uh part of the nipping Beach and there are many Boulders water wash Boulders on the ground here the whitish grayish ones are Quartzsite this particular quartz site would not be that useful for making artifacts because it uh it's been pretty heavily weathered but as we go up you'll start to see pieces that have been worked that have flakes taken off and if you were to like move the leaves you'd see uh artifacts such as the flake I showed you in just lying on the ground so you'll get a a a very rounded uh Boulder or Cobble that makes it more difficult to knock a flake off so it's harder to I guess the flakes are taken off with hammerstones or uh antler bellet moose antler and these rounded pieces are harder to to chip but see some of these pieces appear to have been flaked you know they they do have fresher surfaces on them we'll get some better examples as we go up the hill here so here at this Terrace this is the nipping Beach Terrace this is a beach cut by waves about 5 to 6,000 years ago and it's quite a prominent Terrace if we were to look on a geological map it makes quite a PR oun uh feature the the contour lines are very close here which depict this very steep rise as we're going to be going up and around that time around 5 to 6,000 years ago uh the archaeological culture was the uh archaic or the shield archaic and some places they called it the Laurentian archaic down towards the St Lawrence but it it was a bit different in the sense that these nnab people did not use Pottery they Pottery hadn't appeared yet they did use groundstone tools so they had big axes and gouges and we do find some of those around they appear to have been using them to make Dugout canoes so maybe the Dugout canoes were more common than the the later birchbark canoes lying around on the ground here is a lot of uh Quartzsite artifacts and you may wonder how do you know it's it's an artifact well it's freshly flaked there's a spot here called a striking platform where you can see where it's been hit and it's uh has this little secondary scar here quartz side is is it's silica it's like 98% 99% silica and it breaks just like glass so when a stone hits your windshield you may see a little kind of a dimple that that cone is the same as this circle here so it breaks it follows the same principles of the breaking of any brittle solid in 1951 archaeologist Thomas Lee happened to be driving through the outskirts of the sagua village with his field assistant Doug Bell he'd been hired by the archaeological Survey of Canada to travel around Ontario documenting archaeological sites connected to the Bruce Peninsula area of the province that's what led Lee to manit tulan it's the Northern extent of a long spine of sedimentary rock that runs up the lower part of Ontario a formation called the Niagara escarpment glancing to one side as he drove Lee spotted what appeared to be hundreds of deliberately shaped Quartzsite shards in a farmer's field this field bordered the northern face of the courtz site hilock that would later be known as the sagua archaeological site jumping out of his vehicle to examine the Rocks more closely Lee realized they were indeed shaped by human hands what he had stumbled upon was a large collection of what the archaeological Community calls byes Stone fragments intentionally chipped and shaped on at least two different sides filled with enthusiasm at his Discovery Lee and his team began a full-fledged archaeological investigation of the site with help from the Ontario archaeological Society in the following year 1952 Lee quickly discovered stunning Rich deposit of quartsite Arrow points spearheads scraping tools and other artifacts including chips and flakes discarded during thousands of years of continuous primitive quarrying Lee meticulously cleaned categorized and photographed the artifacts some of which are still on display today in the Centennial Museum of sagua we knew why he was here he was very uh uh outspoken to my dad about what was going on but uh they had quite an encampment of tents at the what is now the government dock was then too there was a big clearing there and there was a lot of University students came uh to do the Dig deeply concerned about the open site being looted Thomas Lee lobbied hard to have it protected in 1953 the Ontario government created the archaeological and historic sites protection act which made it illegal to disturb the site unless authorized to investigate it we're here on a ridge a geological Ridge near the top of the hill at the sagua site is was designated the Mystic Ridge by uh Tom Lee uh he didn't really know exactly why this Ridge was here he thought originally maybe it had been built by the ancient uh inhabitants because we know that elsewhere in North America Earth twerks and mounds uh of considerable size have been made by middle woodland people so he call it the Mystic Ridge but if you look at the ridge itself uh it's shown in here it kind of drapes around the hill it goes down it doesn't follow the contour lines very well and that suggests that it's actually bedrock and if you dig into it we dug into it in 1990 when we were here and the at at the core of it it is an deposit it was an orish beach around 5 to 600 million years old and it has particular fossils in it codons the teeth of ancient Critters uh can be found in this deposit as well so at that time uh there was uh there was high water and the uh the Mystic Ridge is this little Remnant here that was not eroded away and this red stuff here that depicts the uh the Quartzsite the quartsite hill or Mountain that we're going to be going up as we proceed now the next area we're going into here is designated the habitation area because there are many tools found in this area that uh would be used in a normal uh habitation setting scrapers knives uh such types of tools at this particular location uh it is called a habitation area because that's what Tom Lee called it and this is where he did most of his excavations you can see these rows of stones here this uh he marked out the squares that he dug in those days they used to dig 10t X 10t squares typically archaeologists will put down a datam rod or something to Mark where they dug but in this particular place uh Tom Lee laid down Courtside boulders to Mark uh the uh the spots this would be 19 50 51 52 is when he dug in this area you can see artifacts all over the ground but much of what was going on up here was the manufacturer of things called baces this a biface is a stone artifact that's flaked on both faces this is dirty on the back but you can see that it's been chipped to form kind of a lazen or a almost like the shape of your hand and these artifacts but some that would be more precisely made this is a reject this was left behind so it's not quite as good as some thousands and thousands of these things were manufactured and then as they travel across the landscape they may cash some of these they may take them with them and then you can flake them a little bit more and make spear points as we'll be showing in the next uh slide or sign over there but all over the ground you'll see flakes flakes flakes everywhere uh and rejects many of these would break in manufacture and so they'd just be left in the ground a big issue about the sagua site was how old is it and if we dig down here down a meter we'll go through different layers of earth right and in the upper part you have a typical forest soil and then in the second layer here this BW you have a mixture of some bigger stones and some artifacts as well and there's a few artifacts that are found way down a bit deeper into like the fifth layer how did they get there is this glacial till or not Lee returned to chagua to continue his archaeological excavation in 1953 and again in 1954 although he was deeply passionate about discovering all saga's secrets his work was prematurely halted in 19 19 56 when he ran out of funding before being forced to stop work Leon earthed a handful of artifacts beneath a layer of soil he identified as glacial till glacial till is any unsorted sediment left behind by mile thick glaciers as they slowly inched across the land during the ice ages scraping pushing and churning up rocks sand soil and anything else in its path in the case of the sagua area the last glaciation began roughly 20,000 to 25,000 years ago Lee was convinced the soil he removed from above some of the artifacts was deposited by glaciers if correct this Theory would mean the site had been used by humans for at least 20,000 years making it one of the oldest archaeological discoveries in all of North America since Le's investigation remained unfinished the age of the site was never fully established among the archaeological community Lee's assertion of preglacial human activity quickly became controversial since some of Lee's peers felt the site wasn't nearly as old as Lee suggested despite mounting opposition to the 20,000 year hypothesis Lee remained firm in his position until his death in 1982 the site has been controversial over the years it was claimed to be a pre-clovis site Clovis is a Paleo Indian culture from about 12,000 to 15,000 years but the original excavator uh Tom Lee and his crew dug here for a few years and they believe they found artifacts in mixed uh deposits and in layers that were thought to be glacial till so that in their interpretation meant that the site was used and tools were made and occupied prior to the last ice age and that would make it the site maybe 20,000 years old or possibly older in the 1950s uh that's before we had radiocarbon dating and so it was hard to really test that really accurately they were basing it on uh the water levels in geology in 1991 nearly four decades after Lee's original excavation and after extensive discussion with Community leaders of the sagua First Nation the sucker Creek First Nation since renamed on DEC Omni canning and Howland Township a new archaeological dig began the purpose was to finally put to rest the question of the age of the sagua site Dr Patrick julig an archaeologist and anthropology professor at Laurentian University in Sudbury Canada and fellow archaeologist Peter stor led a team of archaeologists and geologists in an investigation to reexamine the site and specifically Thomas Lee's original and controversial assertions were humans actively using the chaguite 20,000 years ago and Beyond they decided to retest that you know to get some money and go redig the site and try and figure out really how old this thing is other archaeologists thought it was more like 10,000 years old based on the kind of spear points and so forth after multiple carefully planned excavations Dr julig and his team concluded that Lee probably misread the archaeological Clues left behind in the soil the sediment Lee had believed to be glacial till was most likely soil left behind by far more recent flooding Dr julig and his team concluded the site's age was likely closer to 10,000 years around half of what Lee had estimated in the 1950s I got involved uh in a number of other people from Toronto the ROM and uh various geologists and we redated it we dug the same pits and came up with the uh the radiocarbon date of about 10,000 years in the years since Dr Julie's investigation other archaeologists and geologists have examined the evidence with few exceptions they accept Dr jig's view as the most likely to be correct so we did some tests and we see that some of these layers are stratified meaning laid down by water so if this is glacial till uh then why would these be water worn layers under here that's one issue another thing we looked at is uh something called joinable artifacts artifacts get broken and then if we dig them up and then see where they came out of and then glue them back together if we find an artifact from up near the top that fits together with one down near the bottom and they they fit perfectly together then the question is how did they get apart that far how did they get so far Le far separated Tom Lee was quite careful he marked where the depths of the artifacts where he found them and we glue them back together and we find that uh tree throws that the ground has all been dug up if you look over here you see that Big Oak blew down about 10 years ago and in the top of it you see artifacts all over the place right uh Flakes and what has happened over the years is the ground has gotten churned up and these pieces that used to fit together are now separated by maybe a meter in the ground due to what we by Mother Nature by bioturbation this tree throw here is a good natural example of what can happen as the tree tips up big chunks will get stirred up and then fall down into the pit and get further down others will end up high on top so you may have some pieces that are way up there on the very top a nice flake that previously was way down so it it kind of get it gets mixed up uh by Mother Nature and the few artifacts that we find that are way way down over a meter down are often in the bottom of these sort of pits three different explanations as to how old is the site uh different interpretations the archaeologic the regular archaeological one is that these earliest folks were they were called the Paleo Indians uh they came over from Asia via the bearing landbridge 13 to 15,000 years ago and they spread across this area another view is a pre-clovis uh hypothesis and that Tom Lee believed in that he thought there would be maybe 20 25,000 there is some evidence for that in other sites so we find sites in South America and in other places that are older than 13 or 14,000 so it is appear that it's partly correct but not necessarily for here because this would have been under ice and water the third view is the view that most many indigenous uh anabia people would say they've been here since time in Memorial uh they believe that they were created here in many cases the the creation story when Turtle Island was created um you know at one time in the beginning um this this world that was just always moving like a star it was um so the first helper Creator sent was um Thunderbird you know they they sent he sent Thunderbirds here to cool her off and and then she became what she is today um once that that land was was formed so Turtle Island um it goes back to those animals in the beginning they they helped create U part of that that turtle that Turtle sacrifice himself by having that otter put that dirt on his back and in this part of um the the world North America uh Grew From There everything was was given to us from from Creator everything needed but it was only half that was that was the relationship the other half was was our responsibility to to pick up uh what was given to us otherwise you know we wouldn't survive if we didn't do anything now here is a major one of the major pits that we re-excavated where Tom Lee claimed to have found glacial till and uh when the glacier goes over the land it tends to put uh marks on the Rocks those are called glacial striations and we had Peter Barnett a geologist look at the rocks at the base of this Pit and the striations were random so it does there was no good evidence of glaciers moving Southwest to Northeast uh in in this area even assuming the more recent timeline put forth by Dr julig artifacts at the sagua site are very old spaning several eras and completely different cultures what prompted the people to abandon the site and the stone tool making that happened there most likely obsolesence as annic people gained access to ironedge tools and weapons from Europeans the relative value of stone tools declined the last time Quartzsite was chipped and shaped in chagua was probably 3 or 4 hundred years ago just about the time that iron knives tools and guns became available as trade goods once the need for stone tools disappeared sagua Quartzsite disappeared from human knowledge until the chance Discovery by Thomas Lee in 1951 despite tool making activities spanning thousands of years in multiple cultures all the people who worked chagua Quartzsite had several things in common one was their great skill ancient tool makers knew not only how to identify promising pieces of rock by site but were also extremely capable at chipping that rock into Arro heads spearheads butcher knives hide scrapers and other tools necessary for their way of life the art of chipping Stone into effective blades is called Flint napping and it's only possible with a few minerals in the world to be considered suitable for chipping to a sharp and useful edge stone must be capable of splitting into sharp edged shards at least twice as long as they are wide all without shattering very few types of stone have this ability only Flint ch obsid obsidian courtz site and a few others are up to the task for ancient peoples on and around manit tulan Island sagua court site was one of the few deposits of suitable raw material in the area that allowed them to live and Thrive it would have been known and visited by people from hundreds and perhaps even thousands of miles away this is an area that is completely covered with chips and blocks dug out 10,000 years ago or thereabouts and it's the Refuge of uh manufacturing chipping uh biface making this area was a a pasture for a while and so there hasn't really been much soil uh deposited on here it's pretty much all on the surface so this is one of the unique things about the Sunda site is you have thousands and millions of artifacts lying around on the surface the art of Flint napping the chipping of rocks to create razor or sharp cutting edges has been all but lost only a small dedicated handful of History enthusiasts have kept the ancient skill alive Dr Patrick julig is among them so today we're looking at Flint napping um specifically making uh tools out of stone and uh there's many different kinds of uh chir and flint and Quartzsite all of these are silica Rich rocks that are essentially like glass this is obsidian which is another material that's used quite widely and these are all about 99% silica so they break like glass and because they fracture in a predictable way you can use hammerstones and moose adlers or or billets and pressure to uh shape them in the way you like in into a desired form now that could be a spear point a b face a chopper and this has been done for millions of years and specifically here at chnda site it goes back about 10,000 years and the material that was used here was this highgrade bar river formation Quartzsite it's a kind of sandstone that U is quite homogeneous and in its best faces over on the side of the hill where the trail is U some of it can be taken out in Fairly big chunks and it can be flaked uh and to make tools of various kinds so today what we're going to do is just do a little bit of uh reproduction tool reproduction uh where we will try to make some stone tools and show how to break uh break rocks basically we're leaning this block against my knee on this piece of raw hide here and that kind of cushions the blow hopefully to keep the flake from breaking into mulle pieces well a flake came off but it it fractured you can see the multiple fractures there but the edges are extremely sharp so that in itself these fragments or flake fragments could be used to uh to cut something so for example you could very easily skin an animal or it's this some of the Flint some of the the rock is as sharp as a scalpel so the obsidian flakes the edge is actually sharper than a steel scalpel so they do sometimes use uh Stone blades for precision surgery let's try a different block and see if we can have better luck with getting a flake off here a nice big flake I'm just going to trim this a little bit take a few off I'm just getting rid of the excess material and cleaning the edge a little bit here the place that you strike it is known as a striking platform sometimes is useful to uh rough it up a little bit with a a stone to prepare it I got to move this in a little bit more I think okay so we're going to try and take another flake off here oh no these are all very fractured material see there so I'm not happy with that block [Music] either okay well this gives you a little bit of an idea you can get off a larger piece unfortunately this didn't really go very far but if if you wanted to then do something with this like turn it into say a hide scraper or something like that the edge is a little bit too thin like you could use it to cut something but for scraping it would be a little bit too weak so what you do oh this is failing here you can just sort of brush it almost and you can see how the little flakes come off now you may this may seem like you'd be dulling it but in fact you are moving the edge back a little bit and making it a little bit stronger so if you were going to use this for a hide scraper for example and it got dull you could continue to do this you can just reshape it with with the antler Billet just by brush in it let's have a look at this flake here so this is a a little bit better quality flake so if I wanted to reshape this Edge a little bit so you can see I've taken a whole lot of little flakes off of there and then this is now quite a h a robust Edge for scraping hides or some types of of uh of needs the antler bullet is used for uh for shaping the pieces now if you wanted to uh take off really small flakes then you can use a pressure flaker something like this and you can just simply push on it and you could see that little flake came off there another one right so if you were shaping something into a really fine point such as an arrowead or something the pressure flaker is the uh the final tool that you use to complete the that kind of a job if you are working on really small pieces like a an arrow point such as the the ones in there uh often you will hold it in your palm like this and press it this way so you can see I'm able to to shape it now the reason I rubbed it was to set up a few little sort of fracture lines in there and then it's easier to flake it sort of will start the breakage so this is pressure flaking and that would be to to finish the tool so if I was making a uh an end scraper here which is a very common tool found on archaeological sites then that would be the way to reshape the end of it so the rock breaks just the same as your windshield cracks if a stone hits it there will be a a cone of percussion that comes off of it and uh it's it's predictable how you know how it will break and it's just uh the Ancients learned that early on going back several million years we're here at the top of the mid Quarry Ridge uh there's a little bit of moss and lyen that has formed in this area uh but you do see artifacts peeking out of the Moss all over the place um this was a major area of uh quarrying and and workshops for thousands of years there's not very much tree growth in this area so it's it's it's all on the ground it's highly visible sometimes we can see places where uh quaring occurred where there's been bashing on the underlying bedrock to take out chunks and in fact there's a number of depressions as we go a little bit further along these are swamps swamps one through four large depressions uh some of them might be larger than several houses that have been actually chipped out of the ground and we find that elsewhere in North America sometimes pits the size of a city block that where particularly good raw material was excavated here on the ground we have many many many chunks some of them were chipped and used and uh quarried out by Nish naabi people but some are uh just natural um waste products so if you dig out a good rock you might you know removes three or four others but here you can see where there's flake scars taken off it's air fairly consistent piece probably a flake scar there as well but ultimately this piece might not have been good enough to make a by face it's a little bit too flawed so it would have been rejected along with thousands of others here Tom Lee called this swamp one and it's it's a depression in the hillside uh if you he dug down into it and it was completely uh had been qued out so this whole depression here is man-made often trees will bring up artifacts and you can see here in this case where a tree has been the roots have been forcing artifacts up out of the ground and so often at the base of trees you'll find a collection of artifacts in such a place we're here here at the hillside Quarry location at the Shaga archaeological site and if you were to look in a book on sagua this might be the depiction this very spot where there was a very large pit surrounded by many many chips since so forth that Tomley uh excavated out and this shows these original pictures but over here you will see the where where the location was and uh you can see how far down they dug into the ground uh 10,000 years ago to get good quality uh quartz site so this is the main reason the site is designated because you have a entire Hillside 25 acres or more covered with artifacts just lying around on the ground around that some of many of them have been there for twice as long as uh the Great Pyramid so if the Great Pyramid was built 5,000 or Stonehenge 5,000 years ago this is twice as old we're now near the top of the hill here at the shagu archaeological historic T this art installation depicts a carbon 14 atom now why would we have physics up here on top of the hill well to date the site we use carbon 14 and so I'll explain that a little more uh at the next installation up here on the top of the hill there's a number of little swamps here and as you know as plants live and grow and die uh they fall down into the uh water in or they accumulate in bogs and so you get a layer of Pete and some of the little swamps here we have one to two meters of Pete when Tom Lee originally dug the site it was just at the beginning of carbon 14 he didn't really have uh the same tools we have now to be able to date things but what we did is we dug down into the the bogs and we redated uh the beginnings of plant life in this area and that goes back about 10,000 years and it shows it going from like an open Woodland to Spruce and into Pine carbon 14 is a kind of an atomic clock that will record how long it's been since something died and we pick up carbon 14 carbon 12 and carbon 13 there's three kinds of carbon but the carbon 14 is is is unstable it disappears over time and it disappears at about half of it disappears over 5,000 years roughly 4,500 so or 5700 sorry and so it's a kind of an atomic clock and it will tell us how old things are and in in the swamp right down here you can see I'm down in a bog uh over further down than the top of the ground and my Trel is pointing at the the bottom of the first accumulation and right there we start to find a few little artifacts and that dates to around 9,500 roughly and there are no artifacts further down in the clay till and but they start at that point so that tells us that's when uh Nishi people started to live around the edges of these bogs and Chip stones and the kids would be throwing stones in the pond skipping Stones like we do nowadays and so uh part of the story and dating of of the site goes back to physics to carbon 14 it's one of many uh useful dating techniques that have been developed as I um undertook my research from my masters uh degree I I asked the question about the place of archaeology in the community from the community's perspective and so I entered that research project um as an applied anthropological uh research project that explored the feasibility of Economic and tourism development and so applied anthropology this idea that you apply Concepts and ideas that are in anthropology for a specific purpose and so some of that includes archaeology as well so I was interested in understanding how the community thought about investing in um archaeology as a form of Tourism and and economic development and I quickly found out that the archaeology of chagua is not as significant as is the historical relationship with the community and um others who who are in the vicinity like settler Canadians newcomers coming in and also government so when I started reaching out to uh Community leaders and Elders I quickly found out that relationships W was really What mattered for the community so relationships with archaeologists relationships with the discipline of archaeology and what really came about in in those consultations that I was undertaking was the the work that was done with um then sucker Creek now omnic coning um how then Howland Township now Northeastern manula and the islands and chenda so they had a partnership so the community's approach to things was articulated by way of these relationships that they had with their surrounding communities um with with professionals by way of archaeology and the history of that relationship so it was more of a relationship perspective and what came out of that was this idea that um an indigenous participation in these kinds of things is uh a metaphor of dispossession dispossession from representation of the past and even practicing a representation of the past but also a dispossession of the landscape itself so I was told of um how the the the hilltop of where the site is located was a significant fasting area so um fasting camps would be held there and uh when I had visited U the site uh at one point in time through the purpose of doing my research SE Arch you know there was evidence that it was had been used in the past as a fasting Camp so you know there's some indication that there's this continuation of this cultural use of the site itself so I found that the community is less interested about archaeology but they're more interested in participating in their own representation and the shenda site represents that opportunity to do so today the chagua site remains legally protected from both l and development Township leaders and Dr julig spearheaded efforts to make it more tourist friendly including the construction of a wooden Boardwalk leading to the summit where Thomas Lee made some of his most significant discoveries although it's unlikely the sagua archaeological site will ever again be relied on to provide the raw materials for creating tools crucial to human survival there's still much it can teach us one of the greatest lessons is that the land and its resources or a gift meant to be used cherished and never taken for granted it's also vital to realize how far we've come and to never lose sight of where Humanity began and how people can rise to challenges that seem impossible today perhaps most important of all the Shaga site reminds us that for the vast majority of human history simple practical tools and skills allowed people to survive grow and Thrive physical records of people long past are rare in this world and the Shaga site is a window into Humanity's past to a simpler time when a few skillfully chipped shards of the right sort of stone kept Humanity [Music] going [Music]

Channel: Bailey Line Road

Views: 808,874

Keywords: steve maxwell, bailey line road, Sheguiandah National Historic Site of Canada, This Small Archaeological Site in Canada Could Rewrite Human History, Ancient history documentary, ancient history documentary 2022, archaeological discoveries, archaeological discoveried 2022, archaeological discoveries 2023, archaeological sites, ancient archaeology documentary, documentary, documentary 2023, flakes from the past, canadas ancient history, canada ancient history, sheguiandah

Id: bhMn0QMoAf4

Length: 48min 25sec (2905 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023