 My name is Dr. Benjamin Porter. I'm the director of the TV Hearst Museum and a professor in the Near Eastern Studies Department. It's a great pleasure to introduce Dr. Sean Buble, who's an associate professor of archeology in the Department of Geography at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in archeology, anthropology, and geography from the University of Lethbridge, a master's degree in Eastern Mediterranean archeology in the University of Newvinn, and a PhD in archeology in the University of Luton. Sean has been directing projects since 1999 and has excavated at sites in the state of Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Belgium, France, Poland, British Columbia, Canada, as you'll see today throughout Alberta. She's currently the president of the Archeological Society of Alberta and co-editor of the Alberta Archeological Review. Today she'll be speaking about mammoth trackers, bison hunters, rock artists, and fur traders, highlights of Alberta archeology. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Sean Buble. Thanks so much, Ben. And thanks everyone for being here and thanks for having me. I was on the fence of whether or not to talk about all of Alberta archeology and kind of give you a taste or talk about some of the research projects I was involved in. So I made hopefully the best of both worlds to showcase not only the different types of sites we have, but also some of the projects that I've had the opportunity to work on. So, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask me throughout the presentation. I'm happy to stop and answer them. So a little orientation of where we are. So the province is just north of Montana. That's the closest state to us. It's a fairly large province. So around 255,000 square miles. So about 90,000 more than California. From north to south, around 800 miles. If we want to drive it. And so sometimes I get to and I drive, I live in the very south. So left bridge is about here and some of my projects are in the very north. So it takes a couple of days to get there and to start those projects. And I've had the opportunity to work throughout the province, but those are more contracts that I do with the consultants. But I'll showcase Southern Alberta and a little bit about Northern Alberta too. And this is a map that Eric Damkar made. He's from the archeological survey. So everything is run by an agency in the government. And so we send all of our documents and all our reports to them. And they've created this master map of around 40,000 archeological sites throughout the province. And you'll see kind of hot zones in the south. That's where most of the population lives. And that's where most of the industry is happening. So of course, many of the archeological projects are tied to the industry. And then up north, you've probably heard about the area like Fort McMurray, which is that highlighted red zone there. So lots of oil and gas. So we have a lot of sites being recorded because again of the industry. So yeah. So we'll go from south to north and then we'll showcase the different sites in between. So I thought I'd start with a fairly small site. This site's called the Tabor Child site. It was famous in the 1960s because the archeologists that worked on this site thought that it was the oldest site in North America. So at first they suggested a date of 60,000 years. Eventually that was revised to 40,000 years. And then a reinvestigation decades later showcased that that site was actually not at all that old. So we know now that it dates to around 5,000 years ago. But at the beginning, Southern Alberta was one of the places that people were looking for evidence of populations arriving in North America and establishing themselves in our continent. So kind of the landscape you can see there and the site itself is on the side of the cliff embedded and enclosed kind of in these mud deposits which we now know was the case at this particular site. So I do, the research that I do there is more monitoring just to make sure that the site stays intact and is preserved for future research. One of the sites that I do spend a lot more time on is the Wally's Beach site. So here this is a site, again, not exactly ideal conditions but it's one of the best sites that we've got. So in 1951, we constructed a dam called the St. Mary's Dam. It's on the St. Mary's River and it flooded the area to create what we now have is this big lake. When the lake gets used by the farmers, it draws down and basically exposes this huge area and then with the winds of Southern Alberta, we have a deflated zone, lots of archeological material popping up and being exposed and then being hopefully collected by the right people. Sometimes that's a bit of an issue but that's for another time to talk about. In any case, so I go and often monitor the site especially when the lake levels are quite low because it's potentially one of the sites where we do have the opportunity to find evidence of early populations in North America. So Alberta could be one of these hot spots where we can see people coming in through the Beringian zone and then into the North American continent. So here you can see when the lake levels are high, the site's fairly well protected but as the lake gets drawn down, we can see the exposure of the sides of the shore and then eventually to the point that we have very little water at all and then the winds start blowing and go out and survey and then you can find amazing things like mammoth footprints just sitting on the surface and they don't last for very long so this is why I'm often out there when the conditions are right because in 48 hours sometimes there are no more footprints to be seen so that's how quick everything gets deflated. So the archeological material starts to collapse and then you have this palimpsest of everything from historic remains to mammoth footprints at this particular site but often you get lucky and you can see these beautiful trackways across the open landscape. So we monitor those, we check for artifacts, we check for hopefully good context of these artifacts so my colleagues at the University of Calgary have found Clovis projectile points with horse blood DNA on them so we know that the people were hunting the Ice Age megafauna at this site around 12,000 years ago but unfortunately it's in this deflated surface context so we've been trying to investigate stuff by excavating down lower to see if we can find something in a stratigraphical high quality condition. So far, stay tuned. The answer is we don't have that yet. That on the left there are camel bones so we also have Ice Age camel at this site so we have horse, camel and mammoth for sure and the artifacts that kind of go with this time period but no smoking gun yet to have them embedded or in the context that we can trust. This is a variety of different artifacts that are found from the site so like I said, everything from early stuff to really late period artifacts all on this, who I'm obsessed on the surface. So one of the exciting things right in our backyard that we get to go to and explore and monitor and that site is potentially one of these sites that are going to yield this information. Another site that I worked on called the Purple Springs site also had the opportunity to find this potentially stratigraphically clean context to showcase these early occupation periods in the province. Unfortunately, although we find lots of artifacts that date to the very early phases of the North American presence we have not found one in situ or in a good stratigraphic context. So Purple Springs, a site that I worked on probably six years ago now, we found a fulsome projectile point on the surface eroded out of the dunes. So we went in and organized an excavation where you can see my students here working in the dune field trying to find this beautiful stratigraphic context. So great possibility, lots of different archeological remains. And in the end, after the excavations we found nice stratigraphic separability. So early paleosols all the way up to pretty recent paleosols. And in paleosol three and paleosol two we found artifacts that date to, this is an oxbow projectile point. So dates to 4,500 years ago and then a pelican lake dates around 2,800 in a nice clear context. But then at the very bottom underneath paleosol three we hit glacial clustering clay. And once you hit that basically you're dealing with glaciers that have been present across the province. And in this area, a kilometer thick of ice was sitting on the province. So there's no way that anybody was there at that time. So you just close up shop and hope for another site to appear. So great fun, of course, great learning for the students but not exactly yielding the fulsome context that we had hoped, but still great archeology. Now just north of Purple Springs is a site called Fincastle. It's where I've spent a lot of my time since 2003, so on and off because the site has yielded so much material and kind of has changed the way we look at a time period called the Basant time period. So a little bit of landscape context. So again in a big dune field so lots of deflated zones, lots of exposure, artifacts being eroded and being exposed. I started the project thinking that this was gonna be a very short project. So I went in in 2003 to survey the area because it was being unfortunately looted. I am still working on this project. It has not stopped since just because of the material that has come out. So there you can see us surveying the area that was being looted here and getting a sense of what the site could potentially yield in terms of the archeological remains. So this was in 2003. You can see the deflated zones there from the winds exposing the sands and this is us looking west. So this is the top of a parabolic dune which surrounds the sites. I'm gonna come back to this in a little bit but you can see here this is all dune field and this area is a little bit wetter and it's been being used for both cattle ranching and a lot of agricultural activity but the dune field has been pretty much left alone so never been found so good potential for archeological preservation. And the site itself is about there. You can see kind of a little white area and that's the parabolic dune that surrounds the site. So I started that project in 2003 and like I said, I'm not finished. So here you can see the dune, just my base points around and I've divided the sites into what I just called the east area and the west area. They're basically linked but because the site is pretty large I had to focus my teams depending on what I was working on at that particular season. And the site extends into this area too but this is leased by a different land owner or rancher. So we've concentrated here but we've surveyed all across that whole area. So one of the first things that I did was I modeled the topography so created this digital elevation model just to showcase the parabolic dune in its extent. This parabolic dune as you'll see later post-stakes the site so it was an interesting discovery. In any case, so I've expanded the excavation area across this entire about 130 meter area of that part of the parabolic dune around 133 square meters have been excavated between 2004 and 2012 and I still need to work on the east area here and expand this block a little bit and finish that up but that's why I say it's not yet finished but and there you can see some of my students most of my projects I run as archeological field schools so there you can see the students excavating. Here you can see the faunal material very close to the surface and other places at the site it's buried quite deeply. One of the signals that the dune was post-dating the site but you can see the students excavating, reaching the bone bed and then recording that information. So yeah, so a lot of bones. Excavating a bison kill site well you get to learn your faunal material quite effectively. So here you can see the students exposing the bone bed. Everything was screened through a 1-8 inch mesh I was really lucky there because I had sand so I could pull out the micro-debutage and really think about resharpening use of the tools, et cetera. So this was a great thing that I could do at this site as compared to some of the other sites I worked on but and then of course recording all of that information. So some of the results I'll highlight now this is one of the maps from the east area of the site so you can see the density of the faunal material so we recorded each faunal remain as best we could assuming that it was identifiable in more than five centimeters in length. All of the debutage is recorded three dimensionally of course the stone tools, the fire broken rock and then lots of collection of the burnt fragments of bone within that one by one meter resolution. So one of the maps made in GIS and here you can see just a summary of the artifacts that have been recovered from that site so far. So around 15,000, 16,000 bones had to be identified to the species, the element, the portion, et cetera. Several of them were tiny, tiny bone fragments that were burnt so that gives us the 250,000 give or take burnt bone pieces that were all counted, cleaned, and then lots of of course debutage and artifacts and things like that. One of the things that became very clear at this site is that we have an initial kill so because we have projectile points but we also have carcasses that are still in more or less complete articulation or at least portions so of those analyses was able to determine that there were at least 63 vison that were killed at the site and this was done as a one-time event and they were probably in and out in less than a week. So organized, hunted, butchered, and then back to their base camp. So you can see articulated vertebral columns there where they would just portion out sections of the animals and leave sections that they didn't get to or didn't need to process at the time. Things like this which I have a close up. You can see how they cut off the legs there so you can see a fracture in the metacarpal area where the lower part of the leg was just discarded and left. So this we call primary butchering when they actually just disarticulate the carcass and then often move portions of the carcass either to a different part of the site to work on it further, different site itself back to the base camp, et cetera. So at this site, we have both the primary and the secondary butchering that's happening and so we can see things like marrow extraction, so lots of removal of those marrow components out of the long bones. We see things like concentrations of the lower limbs discarded but in other cases, concentrations of some of the fragments into what you'll see in a minute, boiling areas to render the grease, mandibles clustered together. This is in a one by one meter unit. So if you can imagine the size of a bison head, you're lucky if you get one in a one by one meter unit, let alone here in this case, we had at least three just because you need left and rights, right? Three bison represented in this one by one. So what are they doing there? They're cutting out the tongues. So probably some person within the community, likely a woman was in charge of rendering the tongues, getting the tongues out of the animal and people were bringing those portions of the animal to that person and that person was processing at that particular spot, so taking the tongues out and then hanging them. So yeah, so lots of great fantastic preservation so we can tell lots of stories. Yes. Ooh, do you want to know now or do you want to stay tuned? It's part of the story. 2,500. What is the nature of the sentiments that would foster this? All sand, so and also something that I'll showcase. The dune covered the site almost immediately right after the kill because the preservation is so good that, yeah, so I'm really, it was an amazing site to kind of start as a looting salvage project that it has eventually become a full blown major research project of mine, so yeah. Like I said, lots of mandible preservation so I was able to age all of the mandibles so a lot of them are adults so they fall in the latter category there but we had lots of juvenile bison too and based on the eruption of the molars and the premolars and the loss of the deciduous teeth you can actually tell the exact window of age so based on that I was able to determine it to late fall to kind of or sorry late summer to early fall kill event which makes sense because a lot of the groups are coming together in the late fall to basically create the cache of the meat and the bison are also coming together at that point in time too, so yeah. So this fits well with what we know about the time period that a lot of these major kill events are taking place, not all but a lot of them. This went nicely with the data that showcases the male and female animals within the herd. So often in the fall the males will rejoin the herd with the females in the juvenile population and here we have based on measurements of the first phalanxes, we can see a clustering of both the males and the females within the population so again these two things kind of go together to really allow us to be confident in that late summer early fall time period, so yeah. The fire brook and rock, yes. Based on the dates that I have and kind of the sense I get from the sediments themselves I'd say within months, yeah, not even a year because the exposure of the fauna remains on the surface in southern Alberta which is really really dry starts to really flake those bones kind of open, of course the meat would have to be taken off like it eventually rots off but yeah. A lot of the surface bone that's, if it's exposed for even a year, will start to become so friable that you'll see that and none of the bones are like that at all but I promise to come back to the zoom. Yeah. Oh, very close and I'll talk about head smashed in too. It's about 100 kilometers so 60 miles to the east of head smashed in and they would have been using a lot of these sites at the same time so yeah. It all depends where the bison are so head smashed in was never used every single year. It's used when the conditions are right for that site and when the conditions are right for another site they would be at a different site so yeah. So fire brook and rock again not very exciting but when you look at the fire brook and rock in combination with the burnt bone and with the bone that's been smashed open to get the marrow you again sort of see these locations of grease rendering and grease rendering is really important because basically you use boiling stones and you put in the bone pieces you get the grease to float to the surface you scoop off that grease you mix the grease with berries and dried bison meat to make the pemekin right and then that gets you through the winter time so a lot of these late fall sites will have lots of fire broken rock and lots of evidence of the boiling and the production of the actual pemekin at the site so yeah so we see highlights in the northeast section of the sites where you can see these pockets of activity in combination with other things lots of the tongue removal is happening in this part and sort of the upper areas where they're boiling and working on the secondary processing of the bison and this was a surprise find one of the things that has kind of put Fink Castle on the map a couple of things but this is definitely one of the things so as we were excavating through those really clear bone beds we would think that we'd be finished with the bones everything would be mapped and then I'd have the students go down at least another two excavation levels to make sure that we're cleared off right so you wanna make sure you have stratigraphy underneath that to really contextualize those remains so we would go down another five, another 10, another 15 and as you're thinking that you're almost finished then you hit the fauna remains underneath that so these were always both exciting and you're with me so here's a pretty good picture of one of those cases where the bone is all here and then this is the top of a metapodial that was shoved into the ground now when I first discovered this case and that case there I had thought well maybe a bison just kind of got stuck and then they just chopped off the leg and left it behind right it could be just one of these fluke situations where this is the case but I've now found 12 of these and they're all in a very kind of consistent context and that context is the bones themselves are sitting right on top of a glacial lacustrient clay bed but then the upright bones are actually pushed down vertically into the clay itself so no evidence of a pit structure they're not scooping out the clay to put in the bones and then covering it back up something else is going on here which I'll show you in a minute so first I wanna highlight some of these beautiful features that we've discovered so a lot of them have mandibles or a combination of mandibles and scapulae together so here you can see a mandible and a scapula side by side sometimes upright metapodials or a combination of metapodials so these bones here that's that case there this is a carnivore skull actually so some wolf likely was at the hunt and they put the skull of the canid down inside there this is an upright with three scapulae placed in a vertical orientation this one is a combination of bones obviously they don't normally go together this is the axis so it's on the top and this is a mandible and these are bones from the feet of the bison and this one here is the most beautiful and this was the one of the ones that appeared in archeology magazine and also is in kind of a few articles so there's the top of it so there are four mandibles and a tibia placed all in sort of an outfanning position so and all of this was covered so the bone bed is taken off then we hit the clay then we dig through the clay and then we see the top being exposed and then of course we section that and expose the feature itself so what are these, right? you of course don't want to go to their ceremonial right away although we're tempted yeah exactly if you don't know what it is it must be ceremonial but putting everything together so they could have been pegs to tie down the hides to scrape them they could have been part of the boiling features they could be part of a number of utilitarian functions all of these which are well documented at many bison kill sites and other types of processing sites all showcase a location or a position in connection with the surface that they're working but in all of these cases the surface was never part of where the bones are they're clearly pressed down into and underneath the working and walking surface that the people were engaged with so something else is going on and then when you look at the selection of the bones as compared to just pegs to tie down things it's clearly intentional and clearly positioned within this context now there are some parallels which we see in North Dakota at a few sites that date to a thousand years later so Finn Castle has these unique likely ceremonial types of the offerings back to the bison spirit I mean there are lots of suggestions that you can make and that my First Nations partners have suggested but sort of a unique thing that are even different than those uprights in North Dakota these are kind of much more elaborate and much they're far more of them than we find in the Dakota region so I'll come back to the Dakotas too but just for a second so the context of these uprights and the bones themselves or the bone bed so you can see some of the bones positioned here here and there stratigraphically like I said the sand is kind of over top and then we hit the glacial lacustrine clays and the bones are really sitting very close to the glacial lacustrine clays and the uprights are placed into the glacial clays if you've ever excavated clay especially glacial lacustrine clay you would probably not want to stay in the business long because it is nasty because it's hard as a rock and so as soon as you get to that level either you have to go really fast or you got to wait to get some moisture back because it's like concrete so there's no way that if there was not water present at this time without digging a pit in those bones so a couple things came out of the georcheology at this site one is that there must have been lots of water present to be able to push those bones in place second thing the sand is over top and you can see this is the north section and that's towards the east so remember the dune kind of went around so if I compare the stratigraphy on the west area to the east area I can literally see the dune just climbing and so we have to excavate deeper and deeper because of course the surface of the dune that we see currently is kind of cresting in this case maybe about 15 meters to the east so if I start there I have to dig a lot deeper down to get to this layer of bone which is fairly consistent across the entire site so the current topography post-dates the topography at the time of the kill at the time of the kill it must have been wet and it must have had some sand close by to the east or sorry to the west that has been blown than eastward to eventually bury the site fairly quickly so here you can see that glacial, lacustrine and clay the bones and kind of a combination of clay and sand right underneath and there that is the surface that would be a little bit towards the west so the difference stratigraphically you can really map out nicely across the site so all in all this is what I think is going on here we have Fincastle Lake and like I said it's really different if you move away from the dune area so here you see the dunes coming in here you see also a marsh that's an interdune pond and this area here has pockets of sand but not like it's all kind of broken and agriculturally used now but you can imagine that this was likely a fairly large dune field area with lots of interdune zones of lacustrine bodies of water and then that all sat on this glacial, lacustrine and clay that was present once the glaciers retreated from the area so what turned out well the first hypothesis was that this was an area where they drove the bison into the parabolic dune they would have needed to create some kind of corralling like the ruby site or a site like that because that dune the bison would just run right over to them right so they're but you know you work with a topography and you create these corralled zones at the time we thought that the site dated to around 1500 which matched a lot of other zones or a lot of other sites in this zone that suggested corralling etc but no evidence of post features no evidence of then this dune being at the time of the site so we're looking at the data I think what's going on is we have an ambush site as the bison were watering in this inter dune zone the hunters very well aware of this basically came in and used it as kind of an ambush site and we have a very similar site about 50 kilometers to the south of this so that matched very well so and that makes sense with the uprights too being able to be pushed down into this wet glacial clay so and in terms of the dates this was a little bit of a surprise so we took backs actually because the projectile points were very clearly from a single time period the bone bed was nice and crisp stratigraphically so a really good single event snapshot in time with the good preservation of 133 projectile points it seemed kind of a closed case in terms of the time period so the guess was around 1500 the radiocarbon dates on the bones all came back a thousand years older so 2500 years ago and then I was not just satisfied that so I did a whole series of OSL dating here is the glacial clastrian clay here is the bone and here is some sand right over top so you can see that I'm ranging between this is the clay so dating to around 2900 and this is the sands over top 2000 years ago and the bone right in between so those two dating methods corroborated the 2500 year which was a bit of a shock right so you want to make sure that your stratigraphy and your dates kind of make sense so all of that together with the projectile points made me re-examine the nature of the site and re-look at what's going on in the Northwestern Great Plains so you can see the variability I'm showcasing these beauties here because they're made out of Knife River flints and Knife River Flint is sourced to North Dakota which was my only link with the uprights so things were kind of coming together here now unfortunately let's get that unfortunately North Dakota sites with a few uprights that we've got date to like I said 1500 years ago so our fincastle hunters coming out of the region of North Dakota coming into the area of the Northwestern Plains are they the earliest of the Basant people in this neighborhood maybe right I mean I think so so here are kind of some of the sites that I've looked at and compared so a lot of connections with this area here and more than 80% of the material is Knife River Flint so it's not just a little it's a lot so probably if they don't have direct trade networks they're coming in from the area so yeah Headsmaster and Buffalo Jump so like I said just a little bit to the west there's another project that I work on and I seem to get roped into these Fison kill sites I don't know how that happens but UNESCO World Heritage site it's amazing site if you ever have a chance to go to Alberta you should really visit Headsmaster and Buffalo Jump so lots of projects have been done at the site there you kind of see the landscape connected this is right beside the jump itself and there's right here this is the Calderwood Jump so like I said they don't always use that same jump year after year they're going to go where conditions are best so sometimes they use the Calderwood obviously they went to Fincastle and other places around so I'll just quickly talk about this because this was a little side project that we were doing at the jump site so here you can see us excavating just so the jumps up here so just below the jump in the processing area and what we wanted to do is we wanted to expose a big roasting pit that they would have placed the animals into or at least sections of the animals overnight and then open up and kind of celebrate the hunt and the kill so we wanted to put one of these in the Royal Alberta Museum so we exposed it plastered it, dug it out and put it on a flat red truck and drove it 700 miles north so and now it's sitting in the museum at the Alberta Museum so pretty fun I got to work with paleontologists and learn how to plaster things and one more bison kill site quickly because there are a lot of them but I wanted to showcase these because it's not just about these jumps it's about the different strategies that the First Nations people use to hunt the bison so here you can see the bone bed eroding out of the side of the cliff and this is the Twin River site so lots of erosion and exposure of many of these types of sites so what we did there is we did our best to collect what we could and again it's not a small quantity of material coming up but a really good showcase of more of the corralling method so funneling the bison into enclosed spaces and then trapping and hunting them there this site dates to around 650 years ago so it's later than the other sites and writing on stone also a UNESCO World well hopefully it will be a UNESCO World Heritage site again so like I said lots of river erosion and exposure so this was a bit of a fun project in that we had to surface survey in the water which was exciting so there you can see my students collecting the artifacts and mostly the funnel remains from the site itself and the site is eroding off of this surface here so you can probably jump but likely a corral as well at writing on stone and then you can see some of the material and then that's the probably the bone bed location so we'll have to open it from above and start to excavate down I wanted to showcase this site because a lot of the work that I'm doing right now at writing on stone is focusing on the rock cars rather than the bison bone itself but because many of these sites are the best of all of these worlds so the rock art is exposed on these beautiful sandstone panels which are exposed to the wind and lots of erosion so what we're doing as part of a monitoring program is we go to the different panels we record the rock art over and over and over again to study the erosion rates and to see what's happening and also as a way to preserve the records of the site because they're gone for a certain amount of time so I wanted to show you guys this because you can't really see anything if you really squint you can see a circle that's representing a teepee and there are figures inside that's what the surface would look like if you don't know what you're looking for but there's paint, there's petroglyphs and these are some images that were done more than 100 years ago and they're in the Glenbow archives so you can see the paintings in this case the petroglyphs but they're also pictographs so we monitor a whole series of panels every single summer and then record that information in these big databases and there are some pictographs too so one of the things that we're up to now that site is tied to another probably ceremonial site called the Noble Point effigy and so here you see a figure on the ground and so we have several of these figures in Alberta and we use the collective term effigy to refer to both the nappy effigy the creator effigies and the animal effigies and then the narrative effigies this is none of the above which was also really really fun to discover so we mapped it out I did a lot of assessments not just of site itself but of the materials being used and then really wanted to look at well what does it best connect us to so these are the nappy effigies so lots of rectangular bodies heads almost always facing the west penis these things expose nappy the creator as the stories told by the First Nations laying back and being happy and admiring his work that he's done at that particular spot relaxing and enjoying himself there is a figure of a turtle so that would be the animal effigies and then the narratives are like stone carons and stories behind so this didn't really fit with any of those things so my work at Reading on Stone was fun because then I started to tie those things together and the effigy at the noble point looks a lot like the shield bodied warriors that are present in the rock art so we can't date the noble point effigy but according to some of our dates from the rock art it probably dates to the end of the late prehistoric time period but we have no other parallels to this effigy site so kind of the new and on the map site type some more nappy effigies so those were all in southern Alberta and now I just want to pop to the north for a little while because that's where I get to do the late historic stuff so the fur trade project and that Robin was on last summer so Fort Vermillion 1 was occupied around, well established in 1798 occupied until 1830 when that site was moved downriver so this is the peace river in the northern part of the province in the boreal forest so a completely different type of archaeology and just as fun so you can see us arriving at the site the density of the bush so really really tough I need to make sure I know where my students are all the time so they don't get lost and and then so first we have to clear the site then eventually we establish the excavation units and then yeah expose the the material remains that we can see the students excavating this is the bore river post so this is just downstream of Fort Vermillion 1 so I've kind of combined these because they both represent the early European move into Alberta so we're quite a bit later than what's going on in the United States so our earliest site is the bore river post and that's 1798 and then Fort Vermillion right after that and then eventually the Europeans kind of establish themselves throughout the province which is happening in the north first following the fur trade line so yeah excavating so lots of exposure of the fireplaces big cellars of course full of archaeological materials other things like palisade walls so here you can see beautiful stratigraphic sections of all of these cuts you can see the beams still preserved and this is the boreal forest so you'd think like based on the moisture lots of trees lots of acidity within the forest but because it's buried under lots and lots of silt layers because of the flooding on the peace river we have fantastic preservation including even the floorboards of the houses so yeah pretty cool so what we were able to establish is based on the architecture we have evidence of what's called post in ground construction so it's when the early fur traders in the area dug the pits placed the post into the ground and then created the sill and then all of the beams of the homes on top of that eventually that gets replaced by the post on ground construction method and this is around 1830 to 1850 and so we have solid evidence that this is an early fur trade post probably in the case of our guesses Boy River and Fort Vermillion based on the journals but there are lots of sort of things to still be clarified at these sites so anyways some of the stuff that we've discovered so as promised Robin finding one of the material remains so lots of jewelry lots of of course European goods coming in axes pocket knives, knives, kettles etc and then lots of connections with the first nations so using the trade silver putting them on the garments lots of beadwork lots of even beads still in situ so we can see the color choices of the beadwork the beads being used so great preservation and then kind of full circle back to prehistory so one of the things that we did this summer is we surveyed the Gull Lake site again hoping to find one of these sites that showcase the early peopleing into the Alberta province we found great artifacts all unfortunately exposed on the surface everything from really really early artifacts dating to probably 9,500 all the way to Métis Cabin still standing on the site so exciting because Winchester and then project up points just sitting on the surface yeah so pretty fun stuff and hopefully that's a little bit of a taste of what's going on in our province and one of the sunsets that we got to see this summer and this was base camp so thank you yes for sure yeah cause even the canid skull lots of these earlier sites we have evidence of a domesticated form of the canids and likely using the terroir yeah of the bison kill stuff or yeah in the province probably our earliest site is actually not with bison it's with sheep mountain sheep and it dates around 11,000 yeah yeah and then of course the bison stuff will come pretty shortly thereafter at least the sites we've got we assume at the very earlier time periods too but likely not in the at the end of the ice age so that's probably still isolated mammoth hunting horse hunting camels etc that was probably all kind of an isolated kill event rather than a collective event and then once we move into the later Holocene time period then things are pretty quick so yeah yeah I wanted to ask about your first site that you can dwell on the most Karen you saw a lot of other sites after that but you said that the preservation was really good the sand on your clay what kind of flavor did you find there? oh that's a good question so I thought that I'd had even some preserved bison patties with plant remains inside that turned out to be a sort of later stuff because it was on in the eastern part of the site that wasn't as low as the other parts so I didn't really trust it to be as old as I had hoped in terms of the kill event once I get stratigraphically low enough not a lot of plant remains we were able to recover so either one of two things as that wind is whipping in a lot of those more light friable remains probably a lot of burnt material is being blown out and so maybe I'll find it a little bit to the east as I dig in that section or the situation isn't good enough to have the no with dung so the yes exactly and I don't have any of it preserved enough I have the burnt bone to kind of showcase where that's happening but none of like no ash or no sort of yeah at that particular spot but we know that they're using bison patties to fuel for the fire yeah but unfortunately nothing that I've seen so far but I have tons of sediment samples that haven't been processed yet so of course we'll look for these plant remains and fingers crossed we'll find something in there it'll likely showcase this open plains landscape but still right good to know this is an assumption that they are gathering the berries probably from another spot towards the river the river is about four kilometers north of the site so probably collecting the berries in these more riparian zones and then bringing it to the kill spot yeah but we should find some hopefully we should you had a lot of firecrack rocks and is it locally available did they have to bring that in yeah so in this case they had to bring it so they had to walk those four kilometers or at least gather it from someplace else that's the same thing that we see at head smashed in so head smashed in is on a cliff face and it's sandstone but they deliberately walked to the alluvial plains to collect the quartzites to bring the quartzites in the granites rather than the sandstone because the sandstone just falls apart total weight for all the firecrack rocks oh I don't but I I do in the database but I've never actually you know so many tons especially if it's a single event kill what they did in order to process it there's the kill but then there's all the other stuff that has to go on to make the results of the kill usable that of course is going to involve a much wider community so in some ways rather than focusing on what everybody presumes are the men who are out there killing that's the big deal to think of the whole community what they had to do collecting the dung exactly as you mentioned the processing it's a much bigger story I know and I played a little bit with the uprights whether there were kids playing and like making these things while everybody was doing other stuff or the kids collecting the rocks like you go down to the river and you bring up the rocks right and yeah so it's you're right it's the whole community process yes you mentioned recently First Nations consultants do also have First Nations students taking up the bridge yeah we have a lot of First Nations students at the University of Leffridge we're really fortunate so yeah yeah so just thinking about these uprights and just your phones it's like a zore or nightmare or nightmare but just in terms of trying to figure out how they were placed and when based on the sort of timing of the processing of these things obviously like metapodials put down to the ground had to have been processed already because otherwise you can still have the toes stuck to them so obviously not something they're doing right when they start the process they would have had to have gone through all that sort of disarticulation used older bones but even then those would break so that helps target like maybe when they were doing this it wasn't something that was a prep for getting ready for the process right especially because the bones are really mixed and kind of underneath the bed itself so it's that deliberate offering afterwards or some sort of activity I mean we have lots of First Nations stories about the offering to the bison giving back to the bison like the Anishkham and things like that where maybe there are parallels but it's a lot older than any of the more recent sites and stories so yeah but yeah you're right they would have had like did they take the mandibles from the place that the person was processing the tongues and then collect those mandibles and then go and place them here they would have had to or else everything is still impossible to get apart right with all the meat and the hide and the fur and yeah yeah it's not at all but it might be an interesting thing in the late Paleolithic in southwestern Europe they've now located that in many of the cave sites that have cave art there's all sorts of bones stuck in the floor and I could reference bones stuck in the floor in about 13 to 20 different sites in the southwestern part of France and they also were sticking them into niches in the cave walls because there they are and you don't have cave wall niches but doing something with bones yeah there's something going on that was bone processing there was just something about making some sort of connection through the bone through the floor oh that'd be great thank you and again thanks for having me very interesting expanding our horizon