My First Entry

Hi there.

This is my first attempt at blogging. I don't really consider myself the blogging type, but I'm giving it a shot. My roommate has a pretty decent one, which is what inspired me to try this out.

I asked him earlier today, "If I had a blog, what would it be about?" Although I was joking at the time, I thought more about it later and came up with this idea. If I'm going to spend hours writing about stuff on the internet (when I should be doing things like schoolwork instead), it had damned well better be something I'm interested in. As my failed attempt at a title for this blog implies, I'm interested in ancient things, particularly in my home country.

I'm a student at Trent University, studying archaeology. I have a particular interest in Ontario and Canadian archaeology. Really, though, I'm fascinated by all things past. Growing up, my Dad would take my brother and I fossil hunting. I pretty much grew up in the Royal Ontario Museum - we were members for years. The dinosaur exhibit and the ancient Egypt exhibit were my favourites. At the time, it all seemed related. Dinosaurs are old, so are ancient Egyptians. I know now, of course, that the studying of these two things takes place in vastly separate disciplines of research. Of course a large portion of people, upon hearing my chosen field, comment on how much they loved dinosaurs when they were kids, too. When I correct them, and tell them that archaeology is the study of humans in the past, most switch their thinking to Egypt. Most can't understand what there would be dig right here, in their own backyards, underneath their modern Canadian cities.

This is completely understandable, of course. Public knowledge is greatly influenced by large institutions like museums, where the type of material they have is the type of material they will tend to display. The Royal Ontario Museum has lots of dinosaurs - it's one of their big selling features - and so dinosaurs what many patrons of the museum will associate with antiquity. On a less innocent level, centuries of racially-motivated governmental policy concerning the First Nations peoples of Canada has resulted a severe lack of First Nations history taught in our schools. People just don't realize what kind of history we have here. They don't realize that (according to scientific evidence) people have lived on this continent for over 13 000 years - that's triple the age of Khufu's Pyramid at Giza. They don't realize that there were Indigenous peoples here before the fur trade. They don't realize that millenia before their Toronto condo was built, ice age hunters were stalking caribou and mammoth on the shores of Lake Ontario.

But like I said, it's understandable - public education has failed people in many ways, and this is just one of them. I often feel that Canadians, and Ontarians more specifically, have a chronic and severe lack of historical understanding and identity. People elsewhere in the world, Greece or Italy for example, are literally immersed in visual reminders of their own history and cultural identity. I would assume that the average school curriculum on Rome devotes a large chunk of time and energy toward the teaching of ancient Roman history. How could they not, with features like the Colloseum dominating the cityscape? But are elementary or high school students in Ontario even introduced to the antiquity of their own province? Not once. Not in my experience at least. Canadian history began with Cartier, so I was told. The Natives were important only in that they saved his men from scurvy, and later traded beaver pelts to the Europeans so they could make nice hats. After that, they disappeared. So I was told at my public school in Ontario.

This lack of understanding results in the devastation of a landscape rich in archaeological material (it also results in the continued marginilization and misunderstanding of First Nations peoples, but that's a topic for another blog). In Ontario, and indeed in much of the rest of the world, histories and stories go untold. Case in point: in the 1970s, a series of sites were excavated by Dr. Peter Storck, now Curator Emeritus at the ROM. Storck's specialization was in the first people to inhabit the province, at a time known as the early "Paleoindian Period" (ca. 11 500 - 10 000 years ago). One of the sites he excavated was called the Banting Site - so named for the fact that the site occurred on the farmstead of Sir Frederick Banting's birth. The site was partially excavated, and then left alone. Now a team of contract archaeologists are hurrying to finish excavations at the Banting site, because very soon there will be a Wal-Mart, or a parking lot, or some other eyesore right on top of that property. So, here we have not only evidence of Ontario's earliest inhabitants, something the most people will never have the chance to see and understand, as well as the historic homestead of a Canadian Nobel Laureate who co-discovered insulin. And both will soon be under asphalt. You see what I mean? It's this apathetic view toward history that drives me up the f$#@ing wall. Did anyone consider an interpretive centre? A small museum? Some funded by the public, and intended for the public, to further our understanding of this place we live, and all its past uses? No, no one considered those things, they just bent over and let the Smart Centre people... take advantage. I could name a dozen other examples, but I won't bore you.

Anyway, I should wrap this first post up. I think the goal of this blog will be to make issues and news in Canadian history important and relevant for people. I want to encourage people to see beyond the modern gridlines of roads and suburbs, and consider the meanings and histories embedded in this landscape by countless generations of people. I want people to know that archaeology is more than just digging up bits of stone and bone - it's bridging the gap between the people who lived here before us, and our naive modern society that too often turns a blind eye to them. Oh, and most importantly, archaeologists DON'T DIG DINOSAURS.