FIRST McMaster University Collaborative Archaeological Field School

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The collections held by Sustainable Archaeology McMaster mean many things to many different people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

McMaster University (2013)