Snake Hill Cemetery
One of ASI’s most notable projects was the Snake Hill Cemetery in Fort Erie, Ontario that involved the discovery, exhumation, and repatriation of 28 American soldiers from the War of 1812. Archaeological investigations began at the Snake Hill Site with the discovery of Burial 2, a 24-26 year old soldier. The binding of his feet […]
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 […]
The Damiani Site
In 2006, ASI was retained to assess a large secondary plan in the City of Vaughan. Five sites were originally discovered on the property (three Euro-Canadian sites and two precontact Indigenous sites) during Stage 1 and 2 investigations. Additional work was recommended for all five. Further investigation revealed that one of the precontact sites was a […]
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 […]
The First Parliament Site
People strolling along Front, southern Berkeley and Parliament Streets, downtown Toronto, would find a car wash, a parking lot, and a car rental agency and a Porsche dealership. However, if it was possible to peek underneath the pavement, one would find an impressive relict of our national history – Upper Canada’s First and Second Parliament […]
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 […]
The Huson Site
Today vehicles drive right though the exact spot where more than 90 centuries ago a small band of hunters set up camp and went about their daily lives shaping stone into tools and weapons. Welcome to the Huson Site, a site so rare in Ontario, ASI pulled out all the stops to decipher and understand […]
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 […]
The Mantle Site
The Mantle site is a large 16th century ancestral Huron (Wendat) community, which was discovered in an agricultural field just south of the Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville. It was excavated by a team of ten archaeologists between 2003 and 2005 and was found to cover an area of almost ten acres (4.2 ha). While the remains of multiple rows 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 […]