Reflections and My Early Experiences

Personal essays, academic milestones, and behind-the-scenes perspectives spanning over sixty years in Canadian archaeology.

Early Studies of Crawford Lake Sediments

Welcome back to our continuing blog series on Crawford Lake. In an earlier post I noted that, while I was a graduate student based at Erindale College, U. of T., I was asked by Professor Roger Byrne to help locate an archaeological site he predicted would be found beside Crawford Lake. This small lake was ...

Before the Crawford Lake Archaeological Research Program – Part 2

Our excavations at the Brown site were quite different from those at the Milton site. We began our excavations at the top of a bank, hoping to unearth a palisade surrounding the settlement. We did locate a row of post moulds which may in fact represent part of the palisades surrounding the village. Of much ...

Before the Crawford Lake Archaeological Research Program

Let's look back at other investigations I embarked on during my time as a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. In 1969 Professor Mohr hired me to carry out an archaeological survey to find sites suitable for an archaeological field school he was to teach. The excavations were designed to introduce second-year ...

Revitalizing Wilfrid Jury’s Museum of Indian Archaeology and Pioneer Life – Phase 1

The first phase in revitalizing Wilfrid Jury’s museum involved changing reporting responsibility for the museum as a non-academic unit of The University of Western Ontario ... With the appropriate research and exploration, we decided to establish the museum as a UWO research centre which would accomplish what we had learned through Professor Ames, in that ...

Wilfrid Jury’s Museum of Indian Archaeology and Pioneer Life in 1976

This was state of affairs at the museum at that time. I assumed the position of Executive Director in February 1976 and began the challenge of its revitalization as an archaeological research centre committed to field work, analysis, and reporting of sites in southwestern and southcentral Ontario. It was a daunting task, but one which ...

My Early Years at The University of Western Ontario

It was with this background knowledge that I took on the job to dig the Draper site, which was a vital component in the revitalization of Wilfrid’s Museum, in part because it demonstrated the ability of archaeology to continue to attract large contracts to the university. It is also part of the narrative in understanding ...