Stories from the Ground part 1

Rescuing moments from the long-buried past

words :: Peter L. Storck

illustrations :: Lani Imre

Most of us live in the moment or are preoccupied with what we intend to do in the next moment as we rush through our days. It takes the unexpected to make us stop and consider other moments. We are surrounded by them—they have been sculpted in a land shaped by the Ice Age, shaped again by climate change and written in the lost and discarded artifacts and detritus left by those who came before us. Occasionally, moments from those lives may be glimpsed by the discovery of a time capsule in a house foundation, a hoed garden, a ploughed field, a forest trail, a stream bed.

This happened recently for Ned Morgan, the editor of this magazine, when he found a spear point in the pebbly bed of a shallow stream in Meaford, 3,000 years after it was made. The person who made it was a distant descendant of hunter-gatherers with genetic roots in north-central Asia who crossed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and colonized the Americas at the end of the Ice Age, more than a hundred centuries earlier. When their descendants arrived in the recently deglaciated region of southern Ontario, the land was covered by a spruce parkland, not unlike the treeline in northern Canada today, and home to mammoths, mastodons, caribou, grizzly bears and arctic fox, to mention just a few.

The descendants of those late Ice Age people had to adapt to continually changing environments of a new geological epoch: the Holocene. The epoch opened with a near-glacial environment caused by cold, dry winds off the wasting ice sheet, followed by a period of progressive warming when the parkland was replaced with spruce, then pine forests, then mixed hardwood forests much like today. Early in this period, water levels in the Lake Huron and Georgian Bay basins fell and then rose several times before falling down to the middle of their basins, becoming closed and saline. Then the climate turned wetter and Lake Huron rebounded to higher levels than today. At the peak of the warming period, called the Hypsithermal, the climate became much warmer than today. Shortly after this, the climate began to cool again and Lake Huron fell to its current level.

These climate shifts, with fluctuating lake levels and changes in the composition of the forests— affecting the distribution of

Fun

June 24 - The Last Waltz

A musical celebration of THE BAND

July 7 - The Western Swing Authority SUMMER THEATRE

Confessions of a Redheaded Coffeeshop Girl

July 11 to 15

One-Man Star Wars Trilogy - July 25 to 29

Tom Thomson’s Wake - August 15 to 19

July 20 and 21 - Daniel

Trio

July 22 - Matchedash Parish 12 of the country’s top blues and roots music artists

August 26 - Everyday People

The Music of Sly and the Family Stone

September 9 - Hotel California

The Original Eagles Tribute

September 16 - The Fabulous Johnny Cash Tribute

September 23 - Brass Transit

The Musical Legacy of Chicago

For these great shows and so many more, visit: mammals, birds and fish—required new adaptations from Indigenous peoples who depended on hunting and fishing for their livelihoods, drawing people to the interior of the lake basins as their levels fell, and then forcing them out again as levels rose.

Soon, cultural influences would replace climate change as a major player in the lives of Indigenous peoples, notably widespread religious movements reflected in burial offerings and mound building. At roughly the time the Meaford spear point was lost, mortuary offerings in cemeteries indicate that Indigenous people in Ontario had wide social networks involving trade, believed in an afterlife where they would wear adornments and use the tool kits buried with them, had strong spiritual connections with the animals they hunted and trapped, and may have believed in a spiritually animated world.

Other cultural influences sparked a transformation from hunting-gathering to food production with cultigens derived from Central America and the North American midcontinent. With food production came village life and the development of complex societies by the Ontario Iroquois (the Huron-Wendat, first along the northern margin of Lake Ontario, and later, in the Lake Simcoe/ Georgian Bay region; farther west, the Tionontati, or Petun, in the Collingwood/Meaford/Creemore area; and in the Hamilton area, the Neutral). Together with Algonquian-speaking huntergatherers such as the Anishinaabe, these are the people whom the European explorers, traders and missionaries encountered in the 16th and 17th centuries. With this contact began an existential threat to Indigenous peoples from disease, warfare, displacement from ancestral lands and Euro-Canadian suppression of Native languages and cultures, culminating in the residential school system—the most recent chapter in a sweeping story of resilience from the Ice Age to today.

These stories—prehistoric and historic alike—could have been swept away by time. They haven’t, but they are woefully incomplete—indeed, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. Rescuing them begins with recognizing the importance of chance discoveries, such as the spear point reported by Morgan, and asking what they might tell us and what else might be in the ground. Such discoveries could be rescued if reported in time, ahead of huge changes in our own environment from climate warming and the quickening pressures of urban development. They’re important for all of us in the truth and reconciliation process and for what they can teach us about the collective human experience. As you rush through your days, watch for the lifting of the veil that may reveal these stories.

Archaeologist and author Peter L. Storck is Senior Curator Emeritus, Royal Ontario Museum. His 2006 book Journey to the Ice Age: Discovering an Ancient World is essential reading for anyone interested in the prehistory of North America.

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