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 […]
Robbie Burns Day
In honour of Robbie Burns Day, we’d like to share with you a Scottish artifact that we found recently on a site in Aurora, ON. This metal button (measuring 2 cm in diamater) is embossed with the words “COMUN NAN GAEL” on the front, which translates as “Land of the Gaels” in the Gaidhlig language of […]
St. Patrick’s Day
In honour of St. Patrick’s Day, we would like to present a few of our favourite Irish artifacts collected from various sites around Ontario. Enjoy! Recovered from the Holden site in Stouffville, this brass, looped-back button (Cat.#4047) is decorated with the image of Daniel O’Connell. An important figure in Irish history and national icon, Daniel O’Connell […]
The Battle of York
In honour of 200th anniversary of the Battle of York, a battle that was fought on April 27th, 1813, we would like to share a few artifacts discovered at Fort York that are dated to the War of 1812. [line] This musket ball artifact was found during excavations for the Visitor’s Centre at the Fort […]
The Broke Token
This “Broke Token” was found in the buried topsoil of the Loretto Site in Niagara Falls. Interestingly, this North American token was found in the same stratigraphic lot as the pai sikka (learn about the pai sikka token). The token was struck to commemorate the first naval victory of the War of 1812 by […]
The Expedient Tool
Various types of stone tools are recovered from Ontario’s archaeological sites each year. Some are formed so perfectly that we know what their intended use was, and others are shaped in such a way that we can pretty much date them to one of Ontario’s prehistoric periods. However there is a tool type that can […]
Blacker’s Brickworks
Stage 4 archaeological salvage excavations were carried out in the summer and fall of 2013 at the Blacker’s Brickworks site (AgHb-415) located within part of the area of proposed residential development at Tutela Heights Phase 1, Stewart & Ruggles Tract, formerly, County of Brant, Ontario. Operational circa 1870-1890, the site was the smallest of four […]
New Fort Site
(East Enlisted Mens Barracks)
In 2004, ASI was contracted by Exhibition Place to determine the archaeological potential south of Princes’ Boulevard and immediately west of Newfoundland Drive in anticipation of a possible construction project in the area. The area is known to have been the site of New Fort – a complex of 29 military features (ca. 1840-1870) built […]