Skip to main content
Skip to McMaster Navigation Skip to Site Navigation Skip to main content
McMaster logo

Sustainable Archaeology News

#HelloWorld, Meet Sustainable Archaeology!

McMaster Innovation Park with Greening Media (December 3rd, 2021)
Feb 03, 2022

RETROFITTED Day of Archaeology 2016

Take a time trip beginning with the early formal archaeology and its avocational or ‘collector’ foundations and parallels in the Province, through the classic works of the 1950s and the heyday 1960s and 1970s, down through the development of legislation, great syntheses and compilations.
Dec 07, 2021

Sustainable Archaeology Update 2017

McMaster Innovation Park with Greening Marketing (November 8th, 2017)
Nov 08, 2017

Day of Archaeology 2016

Take a time trip beginning with the early formal archaeology and its avocational or ‘collector’ foundations and parallels in the Province, through the classic works of the 1950s and the heyday 1960s and 1970s, down through the development of legislation, great syntheses and compilations.
Aug 10, 2016

Student Projects at Sustainable Archaeology

McMaster Innovation Park with Brand Reporting (August 8th, 2016)
Aug 08, 2016

Our Partnership with Sustainable Archaeology

McMaster Innovation Park with Brand Reporting (July 25th, 2016)
Jul 26, 2016

The Legacy of Looting: The Darker Heritage of Archaeology Collections in Ontario

News and social media sites today are buzzing with the looting of archaeological sites, the illegal antiquities trade and the destruction of heritage around the world.
Jul 14, 2016

What is Sustainable Archaeology?

McMaster Innovation Park with Brand Reporting (July 11th, 2016)
Jul 11, 2016

Artifacts on Air - Podcast

The collections held by Sustainable Archaeology McMaster mean many things to many different people.
Jun 21, 2016

The Star: 'Ontario’s hidden archaeological scandal'

There’s a troubling scandal buried in the policy framework that guides the province’s approach to its archeological heritage. Lorinc, J., and Williamson, R. (2016). Ontario’s hidden archaeological scandal. The Toronto Star. Published June 10, 2016.
Jun 10, 2016

Sustainable Education: New Visions for Teaching in the Field

The McMaster archaeological field school, directed by Dr. Scott Martin, has created a lot of buzz here at Sustainable Archaeology, and it has got us thinking about current approaches to teaching and learning in the field and how they relate to our goals for collections management and research in Ontario.
Jun 06, 2016

“Arch. in the Workplace”: Collections & Community

Access and engagement are pivotal values for Sustainable Archaeology, and we routinely take part in events that provide the opportunity for community engagement, such as Doors Open and Day of Archaeology 2015.
Mar 22, 2016

The Value of Legacies: Revisiting Collections at Sustainable Archaeology McMaster

There is no doubt that McMaster’s Department of Anthropology and Sustainable Archaeology have benefited from legacy collections. In our last post, we detailed our methods for processing these assemblages to ensure their preservation and facilitate their use by researchers today. As the McMaster Legacy Collection Project progresses, the value of these materials and their reuse by different researchers becomes increasingly clear. In this post, we will highlight specific sites that embody the research potential, both tapped and untapped, of Sustainable Archaeology’s legacy collections.
Mar 06, 2016

McMaster Legacy Collection Project

A big part of our work at SA: McMaster is processing the legacy collections associated with decades of archaeological work by faculty and students in the McMaster anthropology department. We are tracking our progress and site information here, and also have a series of posts planned that detail what is involved in working with legacy collections.
Dec 03, 2015

Catalogues and Context – the Gunby Site (AiGx-5)

As we mentioned in our post on the Hicks Site, we will occasionally be reaching out to ask for assistance in identifying or clarifying site provenience. Today’s post is slightly different. We know when and where the Gunby Site was excavated but do not have associated records to accompany the 27 boxes of material from the site that are stored at SA McMaster.
Aug 14, 2015

Artifact Imaging - Z-Stacking A Scraper

Part of our work at SA McMaster is to explore artifact material and manufacture technique using our Zeiss AxioZoom high resolution microscope. Occasionally we will be posting photographs to highlight a range of artifacts and the imaging techniques we use to capture them in detail.
Aug 04, 2015

Mystery Box #1: the Hicks Site

As we mentioned in our first post, the Sustainable Archaeology McMaster team spends a lot of time trying to sort out the provenience and excavation details of the collections in our care. To try and help solve these mysteries, we’ll be posting about some of the more bemusing cases from time to time, asking readers to contribute any information you might have that would give us some insight into the biographies of these collections.
Jun 08, 2015

The Archaeology of Archaeology

If there’s one thing archaeologists are good at, it’s gleaning as much knowledge as possible from the tiniest scraps of information. Today, archaeologists make a point of festooning their collections with all of this hard won data so that future generations won’t have to – er – dig for it quite as vigorously as they did. Details about which unit of a site an artifact comes from, how deep in the soil it was, the date it was excavated, and who found it only make up a portion of all the information compiled by most archaeologists working today. We call this “provenience," and it is crucial to forming an accurate understanding of the artifact, the site where it was found, and the people who created it. Some researchers even go to the trouble of recording the precise GPS coordinates of each artifact as it is discovered in the unit.
Jun 06, 2015

Day of Archaeology 2015

To our delight, Sustainable Archaeology McMaster recently participated in our first Day of Archaeology. Our post covers a bit of everything, outlining the purpose of the initiative as well as some of our ongoing projects and what our daily tasks consist of.
May 29, 2015

Hamilton Spectator: 'Safekeeping sought for Red Hill treasures'

Cultural artifacts dug from path of parkway. MacLeod, M. (2014). Hamilton Spectator. Published Feb 8, 2014.
Feb 08, 2014

New facility to preserve past

McMaster University (2013)
Feb 01, 2013