Archaeological discovery offers look into indigenous life hundreds of years ago
Posted Oct 7, 2016 4:11 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Archaeologists have unearthed sites east of Calgary that help paint a picture of what life was like for indigenous people in the area hundreds of years ago.
The provincial government is wrapping up a three-year program to preserve artifacts that were affected by flooding in southern Alberta in 2013.
Archaeologist Wendy Unfreed says the sites are providing an insight on a poorly understood period of First Nations history.
“This is actually filling a gap in our timeline that we really didn’t have a lot of before.”
Unfreed adds the sites provide a window on a time when Europeans were in North America, but had not yet made contact with First Nations in southern Alberta.
“Its a very very very hard thing to see archaeologically, because it happened for such a short period of time before the changes had been made.”
Archaeologist Daniel Meyer says there’s a bit of a time crunch to get work done.
“You can’t do archaeology once the ground freezes. I mean, you can but it’s extraordinarily expensive. We still have certainly another month where we’ll be able to get that work done, but obviously the snow is coming down a bit earlier this year than it was last year.
As the archaeologists showed journalists around the dig sites, heavy snow began to fall.
