The Fuss About Archaeology Conducted On Ontario Farmlands

Farmland development throughout wind-powered Ontario has resulted in the hiring of many consulting archaeologists by developers of solar panels and wind turbine farms and the public continues to wonder why so much attention is given to archaeological sites several thousand years old that hold little or no cultural value to the people who live there today. One reason is simple to explain: developers closely follow the laws of the Ontario Heritage Act, which promotes the protection, and conservation of heritage sites before and after European Contact and therefore are bound to archaeology. The Heritage Act came into force in 1975 as a way to protect archaeological sites. Even architectural structures built over a century ago come under the protection of the Heritage act if deemed of historical significance.

But other than the legal issues, what is all the fuss about these archaeological sites in Ontario rural municipalities? Well, a lot has to do with how little the public knows about the earliest people who began to inhabit the Great Lakes region over 10,000 years ago. Increased development has resulted in many archaeological sites being uncovered, which helps to answer questions such as: who were these early people? How did they survive? [Especially during a time of mammoths and glaciers CP] Where did they come from? How were they impacted by climatic changes? How long did they live on the landscape before being replaced by other groups of people? Which leads to another, penultimate question: How can these questions be answered?

Here is one way. Archaeologists working on a site discovered a location where an ancient person was breaking stone into smaller pieces for making stones tools. Archaeologists found a location below the ground surface where pieces of stone fell and remained for over 7,000 years. One of the first questions archaeologists tried to answer is was that person standing or sitting down at that particular location when they dropped the pieces of stone.

The best way to answer that question was to do “experimental archaeology”. In this case, stone tools left in a forest are observed to determine how natural processes move and cover artifacts over time. Some stone tools are ‘dropped’ or left while standing and others while sitting down on a log or other structure. The difference in posture and stance and the difference in the height of the drop affect the way the pieces of stone fall, land and how they orient themselves on the ground.

This affects the way that they are weathered, covered and deposited. After a long period of experimenting and observation, it was determined that a person likely sat on a log while making their stone tools. The broken flakes of stone, covered and protected by forest debris, resulted in a well-preserved location where someone once sat down to made stone tools.
So the next time you come across a scatter of broken stone try to imagine who sat there as they made their stone tools and what the land once looked like long ago. For the Silo, Lorenz Bruechert. /Jarrod Barker.