Aboriginal History Unit: Research Results:
Post-Pyro Archaeology at Brabant Lake
The usual way to find sites in the boreal forest is to push your way through dense spruce forest and dig small test holes through thick moss, all in the hope that you will encounter a few quartz flakes or some clay pot sherds. Imagine, now, that two forest fires have burned across a part of the boreal forest, removing all vegetation and leaving everything exposed, waiting to be discovered and recorded.
View of an unburned portion of the boreal forest at Brabant Lake.
Burned ridge on the west side of Brabant Lake.
From 1997 to 2000, Dr. Margaret G. Hanna led an expedition to record, map and excavate sites in such an area on the southwest shore of Brabant Lake. Her crew found ancient campsites and quarry sites in areas that would have been impossible to examine, had the forest been intact. They were also able to see entire campsites on the surface rather than try to imagine how the campsite looked based on the results of excavating a few units.
Brabant Lake study area (GlMw-area).
Some of the exciting recoveries include:
· miniature pots (used as drinking cups?)
· stone materials (used for making stone tools) that are not local to Brabant Lake (where did they come from? And how did they get there?)
· Laurel pottery sherds, a style of pottery that is found from northern Minnesota across to eastern Saskatchewan, and which in Saskatchewan is approximately 1000 years old.
· a core of smokey quartz with a tourmaline crystal embedded in it
· the metal parts of an old flintlock gun, lying where it had fallen in the bush.
· sherds of a Clearwater Lake Punctate clay pot (about 200 to 600 years old) in direct association with a bone tool and 8 1/2 glass trade beads.
Artifacts from the Brabant Lake site.
Flintlock gun found in situ at Brabant Lake site (GlMw-2).
You CAN Get Blood From a Stone
One of the questions archaeologists ask is: what was this tool used for? Usually they answer that by examining wear patterns on the edge of the tool. Now, they look for microscopic traces of blood protein residue trapped in cracks of the tools.
Proteins are hardy molecules. They withstand laundering, bleaching, and mechanical abrasion. They have been recovered from frozen mammoths and dinosaur bones, and they are regularly used in criminal and forensic investigations. There are many techniques for analyzing the blood residue, but the basic process is to match blood antibodies found on the tool with blood antibodies from known animal species.
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Four stone tools from sites at Brabant Lake in northeastern Saskatchewan were tested for blood residue. Two tools (a projectile point and a large scraping tool) had no reaction. This could mean a) they weren't used on any animal, or b) the animal they were used on was not included in the comparison sample. Two bifacial cutting and pounding tools had positive reactions. Deer blood was found on one; rabbit on the other. This was particularly interesting because so far we have not recovered either deer or rabbit bones from the site. |
What's Cooking?
Every cook has had the experience of accidentally burning supper. This is a bad thing for the cook and the people who wanted to eat supper, but a good thing for archaeologists. That burned-on 'crud' can provide some information about what was cooked in the pot, even centuries after the pot was broken and discarded.
The 'crud' contains fatty acids which are insoluble in water and relatively abundant in food; however, they decompose with both heat and time. Archaeologists have had to simulate this decomposition to produce a series of samples against which to compare the archaeological residue. Unfortunately, the analysis does not provide an exact recipe of what was cooked in the pot, but it does distinguish among large mammal fat, large herbivore meat, fish, plant roots, greens, and berries/seeds/nuts.
So what was cooked in the pot found at GlMw-6? It appears to have been a combination of large herbivore products such as meat, bone marrow or bone grease together with a nut/seed or fruit such as saskatoon, hawthorn, or pin cherry, a mixture that sounds rather like pemmican.
Seconds, anyone?
Clearwater Lake punctate rim sherd from Brabant Lake site (GlMw-6).
Geochemical Analysis
One of the objectives of the Brabant Lake study in northern Saskatchewan is to determine the extent of the territory used by the people who lived there. One way to do this is to find the quarry source for raw materials, such as clay and tool-quality rocks, that are found in archaeological sites. This is done by comparing the chemical and mineralogical "fingerprint" of quarries and artifacts.
During the 1998 excavations, we recovered two small fragments of artifacts -- a bead and pipe -- made of a light grey, soft rock known variously as soapstone, pipestone, steatite, and serpentinite. All of these "carving stones" have a characteristic soapy feel and dull luster and are easily carved using very simple tools. We were told that people were actively quarrying carving stone from a large hill between Lower Waddy Lake and Redhill Lake, to the northwest of Brabant Lake. According to the Elders at Stanley Mission, the portage between Brabant Lake and Waddy Lake is called Pipe Portage, and the Cree name for Waddy Lake means Pipe Lake. These are old names, for they are found in the Hudson's Bay Company journals written in the late 1800s at Stanley Mission.
Bead and pipe fragments from Brabant Lake site (GlMw-2).
The objective of this analysis was to determine if the artifacts from Brabant Lake were made from carving stone quarried at Lower Waddy Lake. When we examined the hill, we found several veins that had been mined in the past, some of which have substantial deposits of discarded fragments. We collected samples from five areas. The samples were studied using geological thin-sections, X-ray diffraction and the JEOL 8600 Superprobe electron microprobe analyzer (EMPA) housed in the electron microscopy facility in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan.
Examining the quarry vein (HaMw-3).
The chemistry and mineralogy of the samples from near Lower Waddy Lake were extremely variable. Unfortunately, the two artifact fragments were too small to be sampled so their chemistry and mineralogy could not be determined. Their colour, hardness, luster and feel are very similar to the samples from two of the quarry veins, so it is possible that the large hill between Lower Waddy Lake and Redhill Lake is the source.
Scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of sample from Vein 1 showing some of the minerals that comprise "carving stone".
Further Reading:
· How does a Scanning Electron Microprobe work?
For further information contact the Curator of Aboriginal History