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| A rendering of an archaic longhouse. |
If I should ever fail as a writer, I shall surely go back to
my first love, which was archaeology.
(Which is kind of sad when you think about it, but that would be a story for another day.)
I blame the Bookmobile of elementary school days, and
Louis Leakey and the Olduvai Gorge; which I read all about as a very small boy…the Bookmobile was a trailer, dropped off in front of our school, regular as clockwork, every Thursday morning, about nine a.m., rain or shine. More importantly, the teachers encouraged us to go out there and have a look, two or three at a time, and if nothing else, it got us out of class and out of the building for a while.
It’s just a little promise that I make to myself sometimes,
and the funny thing is, it’s not such a bad idea. I might even look good in the
archaeologist’s hat, but I do promise to shave, trim the hair and the eyebrows
once in a while, and the odds of good old Tony Robinson, (a.k.a. Baldric), and
the Time Team following me around anytime
soon would appear to be rather slim.
No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just that my sister
gave me this crazy old map, and I was a little startled to see that the bones
of a mastodon had been discovered down by the river. Studying that map, I see that
more mastodon bones were found near Brigden. It seems that when the glaciers
melted around 12,300 years ago, they and other creatures were following along
the Wyoming and Seaforth moraines. Primitive man arrived not too far behind,
with their spears and their bows and those big brains, which we still enjoy
today. I can find the Wyoming
moraine. If you leave Wyoming, and head west on Churchill Line, you really
can’t miss it: just north of Marthaville, the land climbs, there’s few small
dips, and then, voila! You’re looking
down from a height, and down below are the flatlands so familiar here in
Sarnia-Lambton.
I was interested to learn, that there were ancient
Iroquoian earthworks in Corunna of all places. These are long since gone, or
otherwise inaccessible due to being on private, or industrial land.
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| ...some crazy old map... |
Here’s the thing. At some point I was Googling key
words and all of a sudden I’m reading a pdf of an archaeological dig in the Thedford
area. I’m reading about an Iroquoian village from pre-Columbian times, in the
Burley section of Pinery Provincial Park…I’m looking at drawings of arrowheads,
and looking at photographs of pottery sherds, some of which had been
reconstructed in order to demonstrate the shape of the original piece. I’m
looking at site maps, I was looking at photographs of the famed Kettle Point
chert, the dominant colour of which turned out to be a surprising shade of
yellow, and which was traded all over the Great Lakes. It is, essentially, a
kind of flint, and used for arrow points, spear heads, scrapers, and
knife-blades.
I’ve actually seen that stuff on the beach, and never
even gave it a thought.
The map at least claims,
that the final resting place of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh is on Walpole
Island.
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| This site is typical of Iroquoian culture, it is in Middlesex. |
That may be true, I simply don’t know, but this map is
a gold mine of information. I won’t name them all, but at various times the
Dawn Tramway and the Erie and Huron Railway operated in the south of the
county. The Canadian Southern, the Michigan Central. There were half a dozen
companies, most of them short-lived, all dating to that golden era of rail and
steam.
When you consider the present population of
Dawn-Euphemia is less than two thousand people, even the smallest of spur lines
seems like a very ambitious project. Ah, but when the roads were muddy tracks
through the bush, this was the way the milk, butter and eggs, all those bushels
of corn and wheat, got to market.
The other thing was settlement—if you want people to
take up and clear the land, build homes, schools and the like, you’re going to
have to produce some kind of surplus, and get those products to market. The big
economic lesson here is that it was a cash-poor, and credit-poor society. Turnaround
from investment in seed to selling a crop was a yearly cycle. The margins must
have been very tight. What they did have was land—just land, their own, back-breaking labour, and some kind of a dream, I
guess.
When they got around to building that first, one-room
schoolhouse, it was a communal effort, where the majority of materials and
labour were donated. All they had to do then, was to find the money to pay a
teacher, and it would be eight grades, all under one roof.
Next time I go for a walk in the woods, I will
definitely be keeping an eye out for mastodon tusks sticking out of the side of
a creek, or arrowheads, or fossils, or a piece of chert. Some location, one that looks like the
perfect campsite from times immemorial, or almost anything, really. If I find a
chunk of history or something, that would be okay too.
Also—
Iroquoian pottery had rounded bottoms. It distributed
the heat more evenly, and the pots could rest in soft earth or ashes, as all
cooking was done over an open fire. In that sense, I am learning something new
every day.
And that, as they say, is archaeology.
END
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| Chert, ladies and gentlemen. |
Notes.
The Moore Museum is located at 94 Moore Line,
Mooretown, Ontario.
The Lambton Heritage Museum is located at 10035 Museum
Road, Grand Bend, Ontario.
The former Stones & Bones Museum has found a new
home on the second floor of the Sarnia Library, 124 Christina St. South,
Sarnia, Ontario. It’s a $3.5 million project, hopefully opening in 2028, and
you can donate here.
Sources indicate the final resting place of Tecumseh
has never been proven.
Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.
Thank you for reading.
