Canada Day
In honour of Canada’s 146th birthday, we thought we would feature several artifacts from our archives that we think represent Canada. They just don’t get anymore Canadian than this. Enjoy. 1 The first artifact in this series is a Rockingham teapot found at the Bishop’s Block site in downtown Toronto. Rockingham is a mottled brown […]
Victoria Day
In honour of Queen Victoria, whose lengthy rule extended from 1837 to 1901, we’ve collected some regal artifacts to share with you while you prepare for this Victoria Day long weekend. These items were recovered from various sites around southern Ontario and they demonstrate the magnitude of her reign and her influence on British Canada […]
Easter
This egg cup was recovered from a nineteenth-century housing site on Adelaide Street West in downtown Toronto. The cup features an incised narrow blue band below the outer lip, with an embossed leaf motif (an example of ‘rouletting’) and a blue painted band around the stemmed base. And the animal featured on this next object […]
Fort York
Fort York, considered to be the birthplace of Toronto, contains the best collection of War of 1812 era buildings still standing on their original foundations. These are contained in Fort York National Historic Site, the largest urban archaeological site in the City of Toronto. Until recently, most of the excavations took place under the direction […]
Halloween
The nature of our job means that sometimes we stumble across unusual and eerie things. We’ve searched our archives to bring you three examples of creepy finds or strange sites, which most certainly sent a shiver down the spine of the archaeologist who uncovered them. The first object in our series is a tiny porcelain […]
In Your Backyard!
Late Woodland point from the Beaches area, Toronto In April 2015, Shauna Kirk emailed ASI to ask about a point that her daughter, Jocelyn, recently found on a walk near their home in a ravine east of Toronto. We invited them both in to show us the point and see other artifacts found in their area. […]
International Mother Language Day
February 21 was declared International Mother Language Day by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1999 to encourage multilingualism and advocate diversity of cultures and languages. This particular date is significant as it commemorates the struggles of the Bengali people to have linguistic recognition in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) that culminated in […]
Labour Day
To celebrate Labour Day, we thought we’d show you just how arduous daily tasks were for some of the pre-contact populations that formerly inhabited southern Ontario. If you thought your job was hard, you haven’t seen anything yet… In the early sixteenth-century, the Mantle site in Stouffville, Ontario would have housed and fed over 1,800 […]
Mother’s Day
In honour of Mother’s Day, we thought we would show a few artifacts that are known examples of mothering in Canadian history. The first artifact is an example of a juvenile vessel fragment from the Dunsmore Site; a mid-to-late fifteenth century ancestral Iroquoian village site found in Simcoe County. Archaeologists call these finds ‘juvenile vessels’ because they […]
Remembrance Day
As Ontario archaeologists, we often come across objects from the many wars that have involved British and Canadian forces. In honour of Remembrance Day, we’ve found a few more items to share with you from our sites. Lest we forget. The first items in our series are from the Loretto Site in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The […]
