The Brown Homestead is one of the oldest Loyalist homes in Ontario. Navigating the known and unknown about its early history is an exploration of our heritage. We recently undertook an archaeological survey to add to our understanding of this important historic site. In this episode, supervising archaeologist Dr. John Triggs joins us to talk about the value of what is found and not found, and to reveal some of the stories we uncovered.
The Brown Homestead is one of the oldest Loyalist homes in Ontario. Navigating the known and unknown about its early history is an exploration of our heritage. We recently undertook an archaeological survey to add to our understanding of this important historic site. In this episode, supervising archaeologist Dr. John Triggs joins us to talk about the value of what is found and not found, and to reveal some of the stories we uncovered.
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:08] ANNOUNCER: They say archaeologists never lose the spark of curiosity. It's in their bones. Welcome to The Open Door, brought to you by The Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula. Are you ready to get your hands dirty? If so, you will really dig this episode. So, let's dig in.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:32] AH: There's a certain mystique around archaeology. If you're of my generation, you may think of it as the Indiana Jones effect. But it certainly started before that. The discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt just over 100 years ago, for example, unleashed a worldwide wave of excitement, newspaper articles, and tall tales that resonate even today. Whatever the reason, we got a taste of that excitement recently, when we undertook an archaeological survey of a section of The Brown Homestead, and while we anticipated some community interest, it turned out to be much greater than we expected.
Fortunately, we were able to share a good part of that experience with our friends and neighbors here in Niagara. Today we're going to share a little bit more of that experience and what we learned from it. Our guide for this journey is Dr. John Triggs, who supervised the work at the homestead. Dr. Triggs is a licenced archaeologist with more than 30 years experience conducting surveys at Old Fort Erie, Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, Discovery Harbor, and other national historic sites. He has recently retired from teaching historical archaeology and cultural heritage management at Wilfrid Laurier University. Despite the word retired, he remains quite active, and we're lucky to have him here with us today. Thanks for joining us, John, and welcome.
[00:01:44] JT: Thank you. I'm honoured to be here.
[00:01:46] AH: It's great to have you back, and you spent a good bit of time here a few weeks ago. Starting at the most basic level, why do we undertake archaeological assessments?
[00:01:55] JT: Yes, so we have a process in Ontario, to ensure that archaeological resources or potential archaeological resources are evaluated, and conserved, and preserved, and protected if necessary. So, what we did here at The Brown Homestead was we did two assessments, really. We did the stage one assessment. Stage one assessment is a background research report to determine if there's archaeological potential. One of your personnel here did the research for that report, Jess Linzel. To do that you have to do a lot of historical research, a lot of archival research. You have to determine the property history. What's happened since the historic period? On this site, we're looking at anywhere after about 1796.
[00:02:41] AH: As you mentioned, some of our existing research that helped put that stage one report together as a historic site, researching and learning about our site’s history is part of our mandate. That usually means collecting the best documentation you can, which has always been completed and then interpreting the results. For us, archaeology was a way to help fill in the blanks left by some of that traditional research.
[00:03:03] JT: Yes, one of the things that I specialize in is historical archaeology after European contact. That means taking the documentary evidence and the archaeological evidence and knitting them together to get a more complete story than you can just using one source of information. The fact that a lot of historical research had already been done here, that figured into the stage one assessment was very important to provide context for the artefacts that were found.
But you also have to look at the pre-European or the pre-contact period. The indigenous population in this area, we have evidence, the stage one report told us in this very area within about a kilometer radius, there is late woodland occupation, late woodland people were living in villages, they were sedentary, they had pottery, they used stone tools, they were agriculturalists, and defined that we have was – that defined a site within about 500 meters of this site dates to about 500 to 1,200 years ago.
[00:04:04] AH: You referenced the pre-settlement history of this site, which is important because, of course, the history of The Brown Homestead begins long before the arrival of John and Magdalena Brown, around we believe, 1785, and even the construction of the earliest part of the house around 1796. Our sites within the traditional and historic territory of the neutral Anishinabek and Haudenosaunee people, and Niagara today remains the home to them and many additional indigenous peoples.
So, we always like to remember that in our work and this is a great opportunity to do so. The land where the homestead is located was part of the Between the Lakes Treaty, which was originally signed in 1784, but then revised and clarified in 1792. As the name would suggest, it included the land line between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and that treaty paved the way for the British government to begin settling Niagara, initially, by giving land grants to American loyalists like the Brown family who had sided with Britain during the revolution. The Brown Homestead then became home to three generations of the Brown family, from around 1785 until 1858, when Jacob Brown sold the farm. That's a large part of the era or the time period we were looking into with the stage two assessment, correct?
[00:05:20] JT: That's right. When you do a stage two on a site like this, you have an early time period that is maybe more important than the later time period. But we find evidence from everyone who lived here going right up to the present, the very last owners who were here. We collect all that in a stage two and try to evaluate it to determine whether there's potential for further archaeological investigation.
[00:05:44] AH: Now, relative to other sites that you've worked on, when you got a look at that initial research and what went into that stage one report, what was it that stood out about the site and what, to you, justified moving forward with a stage two assessment?
[00:05:56] JT: So, the stage one determines the potential based on the pre-contact information and also the contact period information. In our case, we found that the site had potential, archaeological potential, based on the age of the house, the settlement history of the property. This is one of the earliest homes, certainly in Niagara, but also in Ontario. There aren't many late 18th century, early 19th century homesteads in the province, and this is among one of those. That also gives it potential.
The house itself is designated by the Ontario Heritage Act. So, that's something that is also used to evaluate potential. It's located on an historic transportation route. The stagecoach route between Niagara Falls and Hamilton. It's all those factors together that determine whether there's potential. That's the stage one. It's a very structured process. The fact that there was potential based on the points that I mentioned before, meant that stage two was warranted. In fact, it had to be completed.
The thing that triggers stage two in this case is not just archaeological potential, but it's usually triggered by planned development on the site. It's by the Planning Act, maybe the Ontario Heritage Act that triggers it. There's different kinds of legislation that will trigger a stage two assessment. But in this case, it was because there was potential that we went to a stage two, and that was to satisfy the – I work under standards and guidelines, so, we satisfied the standards and guidelines for this by completing the stage two.
[00:07:33] AH: Right. In our case, it was really a prerequisite. The plans that we have for the adaptive reuse of the site as a cultural education centre. Now, you mentioned guidelines here in Ontario, who is it that sets those guidelines?
[00:07:47] JT: It's the Ministry of Citizenship and Multiculturalism. That's the new name for the ministry. This is where archaeology is conducted under that ministry. I operate under the standards and guidelines for consultant archaeologists that have been in place since 2011. Before that, there was lots of archaeology that was done, but it became more regulated after 2011.
[00:08:07] AH: Now, we establish that it was both desirable and needed. Let's talk a little bit about the process and exactly what was done. This was my introduction to what you called test pitting. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what that is.
[00:08:19] JT: Right. This is one of those standards that I have to follow as a licensed archaeologist. Test pitting in this case, meant that the land could not be plowed. This is another way to do with stage two, if you can plow the land, then you walk transects. That's called a pedestrian survey. In this case, the land couldn't be plowed. So, we had to do test pits. The test pits are designed to cover the study area, the area that's being evaluated. In this case, we did five-meter intervals. If you can picture a block of land, this is an irregular shape we have for the study area. We had to lay out a grid all over the site, determine how many test pits were possibly going to – or what the maximum number of test pits that were going to be dug.
In this case, when you lay a grid over the site at a five-meter spacing, it gets as many as 300 to 350. But we could eliminate a lot of those because the house is here, there's built structures, there's a pond, which we'll talk about later on, in the middle of the property. Out of those 350, we ended up doing 237 test pits on a five-meter spacing.
Now, a test pit is where you dig into the natural soil or the subsoil. In this case that ended up being on average about 35 centimeters down. Some pits were deeper though, 50, 60 centimeters. These test pits are 30 centimeters in diameter. They're all dug by hand with a round nose shovel, and then you have to record everything that you find in the pit. You have to sift the dirt, look for artefacts. All the artefacts from all of these pits were collected. In fact, we had 115 positive test pits. A positive just means you found something.
[00:10:00] AH: About one in three, as it turned out?
[00:10:01] JT: Well, I guess about even one in two if we only dug 237. We've got 50% of them, I hadn't thought about the percentage, 50% were positive.
The artefacts are collected. We know test pits have to be given individual designations. We use an alphanumeric system, so I know where these pits are located on the landscape. All the dirt is described. So, you have to describe the layers as you go through them. We usually get in there after the shovel excavation, clean it up so we can see the layers. Then, about every fourth or fifth pit, I would take a photograph of. So there's photographic documentation. Then, after that is all done and notes are taken on every pit, the depth of the soil layers, the depth of the pit itself, a field catalogue of the artefacts that were found, then you can fill it in.
Every pit is dug, and it's filled in within about, all some pits might take 15 minutes, within 15 minutes, they're all filled in so we don't have a minefield when we're finished. With open pits, we just have a nice level field. The idea is really that you shouldn't even know that we were here by the time we leave. You leave it as you found it. Then, I take all those artefacts, and that's what I analyze, to try and make sense of or interpret what the artefacts can tell us about life in the past on the property.
[00:11:17] AH: You mentioned the subject area. Now in our case, we have a property of approximately seven and a half acres. Our subject area was probably maybe a third of that at most, covering largely the areas in front of, beside, and behind the house, and the other heritage structures. That was, as you said, the areas that we couldn't plow. That process is a little bit different. In the future, the next stage when we do those areas, we're going to take that different approach, that plowing approach. Maybe you can tell us a little more about how that works.
[00:11:45] JT: Yes. So, if you have an area that can be plowed, or that has been plowed recently, you do a spacing determined by the potential on the site. So this site has potential, so we use five-meter spacing. Sometimes you can use a 10-meter spacing. Five-meter spacing will give you – if there's something there, you'll find it. Either test pitting, or pedestrian surveys. For a pedestrian survey, you line up five meters apart. You usually have three or four people doing it, and you walk a straight transect to the other side of the property. In this case, it's split 125 meters, and you have flags set out to give you a line of sight.
As you find things you have survey flags that you place in the ground, and those are all later mapped. We might have – if you do the area that I'm thinking of there, you could conceivably have a few 100 flags, and they all have to be mapped in place. The idea is to give you the distribution of the artefacts that you've logged or that you've identified. Then, you have to make sense of the distribution. So, it's really, what we do in both types of stage two is look at the horizontal distribution. And if you're doing other types of archaeology research, archaeology, stage three, stage four, you look at it vertically, you look at the layers in the ground, and the artefacts in those layers. We're really doing a horizontal evaluation using a stage two.
[00:13:09] AH: I love hearing that version of it because it reminds me of an early story about The Brown Homestead. The previous owner of the homestead was Jon Jouppien, who was a trained archaeologist. He bought the house and protected it. When he did, he was one of the few people who knew anything about the history of the house. He once relayed a story to me that he discovered the house because as a child, he used to walk behind the farmers plowing the fields across the street in what's now the Short Hills Park. They would follow the farmers as they plowed and pick up artefacts and arrowheads and things. He said, as a child, he used to look up the hill at the old stone house and wonder what it was. And that was his first introduction to The Brown Homestead.
[00:13:44] JT: Yes. What a great story that is, the connection as a child.
[00:13:50] AH: Absolutely. Also, connects us to that pre-settlement history of the site. We were lucky enough to be joined by Jodie Lovegrove, who was a field liaison representative from the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and having her involved was an important part of a project like this.
[00:14:06] JT: Yes. That is so important. It's a recent, well fairly recent development in consulting archaeology. I say recent, maybe the last 20, 25 years, and it's something that when I started doing archaeology as a student in 1980, we used to study indigenous people. There was no thought that indigenous people are still here, as a thriving culture, and that they're the descendants of these people that we study. I always thought, even in the 1980s, way back, that indigenous people should be involved more in their heritage. It's something that I hope to see in my time doing this.
Thankfully, in the last 25 or maybe 30 years, it's become more common, but also, it's part of the standards that I work under. For stage two, three, and four, I involve indigenous people in the process. The Mississauga of the Credit have an office. They have field liaison representatives, FLRs, that are assigned to projects. I always invite First Nations to participate. In this case, that just seemed to be the – I've worked with Mississauga before, and the representatives are just professional. They know what they're doing, and they're interested and engaged. They're researching their ancestral territory. So, yes, it's an important step and I'm so glad to see it, finally.
[00:15:30] AH: I know that having Jodie involved as a representative meant a lot to the people who participated in the project. It certainly added to their experience, and part of that was just that she was a great person to have around. We thank her a lot for being involved. There's a couple other people we should thank as well. Number one, we want to thank the Niagara Community Foundation who supported this project through a David S. Howes Fund Grant. The NCF does incredible work supporting the charitable sector here in Niagara and bringing about sustainable positive changes in our community.
We also want to thank the Zehrs Store at the Pen Centre for donating a gift card that helped cover the cost of some of the snacks and drinks that kept everyone hydrated during that heatwave, where everyone was out digging. That was quite something. We also want to thank Dave Bennison, who helped us spread the word on his Historical Niagara Facebook page, which led to a really wonderful turnout of volunteers. We had some great community involvement, over 52 volunteers involved over the course of two weeks, and that's only because we ran out of spaces. You had said during the project that added a little bit of fun and meaning for you as well.
[00:16:38] JT: Yes. One of the things I used to teach my students when I was at Laurier, was public archaeology is an essential part of modern archaeology, just the way indigenous engagement is. I have to say, I've never worked on a site that has such a thriving corps of volunteers, and a spirit of volunteerism. Fifty-two volunteers over two weeks, and you say, we could have had more. They were engaged. And this is hard – it's hard work. So, stage two is – I talked about digging a test pit and getting down on your knees and recording. But people who had never done this before were doing it in the hot sun. And during those smoky, those smoke-filled days when we had the wildfires in Northern Ontario, they just did such a great job. I really want to thank them for the effort they put in and they were uncomplaining and just happy to get dirty, and do it because they were doing it for The Brown Homestead.
[00:17:33] AH: What a lot of them said was there's an opportunity to actually be involved rather than just hear about something. When we say they got the chance to get their hands dirty, we mean it literally in this case. I have to say too, that in addition to having a great time, one of the things all of them said was that they learned a lot. While that's something that we aim for here with all of our volunteer opportunities, a lot of credit for that goes to you and Elizabeth for taking the time to be not only consultants on this project, but teachers in explaining and demonstrating what we were doing and why. I know you seem to enjoy that part of it as well.
[00:18:07] JT: Yes, I do. You can show someone how to dig a test pit in five minutes, but you have to put it in context. Why are we doing it? Why are we doing it like this? How do we do it? What do we do with the finds once we finish? We have a box of artefacts, and they have to – you don't just do this to find artefacts. You have to make interpretations based on the artefacts. They learned about indigenous engagement and heritage awareness, heritage education. I mean, all those things are just part of public archaeology, and it starts at the community level, and it spreads from there. So, you've got to start local and think bigger. People see things in a different way after they've done a community project like this.
[00:18:49] AH: And get connected to why it matters and what it means to them, and that's an important part of it now. Now, you talked about the artefacts and the findings, and I think that's what a lot of people will want to hear about. What did we turn up in those test pits?
[00:19:03] JT: Yes. The 115 positive test pits, we found evidence of the four different families that lived here. I'm not so sure about the last family, the Jouppien family. We found some plastic toys that could be from the Jouppien family. We found – I logged 1,126 artefacts, which sounds like a lot, but every piece of anything is an artefact. Even a piece of window glass is an artefact.
When you find that many, you have to make sense of them by categorizing them or classifying them. So, I classified them into functional groups. This is the way it's done according to the standards and guidelines, and it's the way that I've always done it. Functional groups give you an idea of, they're meant to reflect past activity and human behaviour. We have an architectural group, for instance. Fifty-nine percent of the artefacts we found belong in that functional group. So, things that are so associated with the building, like pieces of brick and window glass, and nails, they fall into that category. Every little piece of brick too, we kept. Out of that 1,000, you've got a lot of pieces like that. 60% of them are, let's say 600 plus, are architectural.
The next sizable group was foodways. Foodwats just reflects just that. It's the gustatory habits of the people who were living here. What were they eating and what were they eating it off of? What types of ceramics? Ceramics are part of that group and they're probably the most important artefact that we find because they're diagnostic of time period. So, looking at the artefacts, you can distinguish between the different families that were here based on the dates of the artefacts. There's some we can associate with the Brown family. Some we can associate with the Chellew family, and even the Powers family. As I said, even the Jouppien family, perhaps.
So, you find evidence like that, and 87%, almost, of the artefacts are foodways and architecture. Then you find other artefacts that I grouped them into a general category called activities, things that went on around the house. Even cleaning the house, repair of the house, maintenance, that sort of thing. We found a horseshoe. A horse shoe in itself doesn't have any real intrinsic value, but it reflects how important horses were to the 19th century household. And it's a reminder, I guess, for us, that life was different 150 years ago, when people had horses, and they used them for work, they used them for recreation. The Powers family certainly had horses. We see pictures of people riding. There's even a photograph of a first world war group passing on Pelham road. If you look closely, you can see somebody on a horse. All right, so horses are symbolic and they're also – they were just important in a way that we don't see anymore, especially for urban dwellers.
So, there's artefacts like that. We find recreational artefacts. Marbles. We found a couple of glass marbles. One’s 20th century, one's probably 19th century. It's Carnelian. We look at the way they're made to determine the date. We found one smoking pipe piece, which is highly unusual. I want to talk more about how unusual this site is. But the fact that we only found one clay smoking pipe fragment is unusual, because normally in a 19th century site, late 18th century site, you'll find a lot. You'll find dozens or even scores of smoking pipe pieces. It's a recreational activity. Certainly, people were smoking as recreation at that time.
The other thing that we don't find is people weren’t drinking. That's a recreational activity. We don't find evidence of a lot of drinking on this site. Alcoholic drinks. So, we find container bottles, but none of the type that would be for alcohol and that's interesting, too. The artefacts, to really understand them, you have to put them in these categories, and then look at how the categories are reflected across the site.
[00:23:06] AH: You're alluding to something interesting that we talked about while the dig was going on, which is that sometimes what you don't find is as interesting as what you do. Now, you mentioned the evidence of drinking and so on. On the one hand, with the history of the site as a tavern, you would have expected to find more of that. On the other hand, the family has a [inaudible 0:23:26] history, and a lot of them were non-drinkers. There's actually an old family story which I don't know if it's true or not. But John Jr., who's the son of the Browns, who I was descended from, the story that came down in our branch of the family was that he moved away from the homestead down by the Welland River because he didn't approve of his brother using the house as a tavern. Now, I don't know how true that is. But it's a fun little bit of family history. What are some of the other things that we were hoping to find or expecting to find that we didn't?
[00:23:55] JT: Okay. There's evidence of the tavern, there's historical evidence for it. And oral history, as you just recounted, is an important source of information as well. Indigenous people use oral history in a different way than we would as Europeans. But it's also important to record anything like that, any stories about the site, because it does give you another source of information. I wasn't aware of that. That might make sense of the fact that we didn't find a lot of alcohol bottles. But the site does have a – there's an oral history, and there's maybe a documentary history of it being used as a tavern from before the war of 1812, until the mid-1830s. For a tavern, you'd expect to find smoking pipes, and dozens of them, if not more, scores. You'd find liquor bottles, so black glass bottles are typically what you'd find. You might find glassware. We did find one base from a glass piece of stemware. We did have some, didn't find any black glass though that would indicate beer or wine, for instance. Nothing like that which you’d expect to find with a site that was a tavern.
The variety of ceramics that we found, there's quite a variety with a small number of sherds that we found. Sherd is a piece of ceramic. We found 120 sherds of ceramic, which may sound like a lot, maybe. But for a site like this that was occupied for as long as it was, by households that sometimes number 10 people through the generations, you'd expect to find a lot more ceramics. Typically, you do on early 19th century houses. Here, the 120 ceramics that we found represented – like a ceramic sherd in itself isn't important. It's how many vessels are really represented. So, you do something called a minimum vessel count.
There were at least 41 vessels that we found. That's a lot of vessels, especially considering the number of sherds. I think there's probably a lot more to be found on the site in terms of ceramics. But what we did find doesn't support the oral history or the documentary evidence, which I haven't seen yet, but we’ve spoken about, for it being a tavern for almost 30 years.
[00:26:08] AH: Especially for that duration. That’s a long time for a tavern to run. Usually, they ran for a few years before changing locations.
[00:26:14] JT: Yes. I have an explanation for that, maybe we can talk about. When you have a discrepancy like that between the documentary evidence, oral history, and the archaeological information, you have to try to make sense of it. Maybe we weren't digging in the right place. The only place we couldn't dig is the back of the house, the rear of the house under the gravel laneway. Close to the house, artefacts get deposited, they can see by the distribution that artefacts increase in number as you get closer to the house, which isn't surprising, but you see it in the artefacts. There's an area we haven't looked, possible. The closer to the house you get, the more you find. That's what we were finding. There's also a driveway that's outside the study area on the east side of the house, gravel driveway. We didn't test it because it's outside the study area. The other gravel driveway wasn't tested because it's a gravel driveway and we just can't dig by hand through it. But there's two sides of the house that haven't been explored. So, it's possible.
[00:27:14] AH: Those areas you tend to stay away from, the area we're talking about to the east of the house is not only the driveway, but there's an area there that's now a parking lot. But we also know prior to that, it had been a septic bed. It was later rehabbed. A site like that has been so disturbed that there's really nothing to be found there anymore. Correct?
[00:27:32] JT: Right. Yes, one of the things you do when you do the stage one is to look at the integrity of the site. How much it's been disturbed, and that's exactly the kind of thing that you would look at. Chances are, we may never know if it was disturbed with the septic bed. But there are areas of the site, as I said, the north part of the house, the rear of the house, where artefacts typically get deposited, refuse gets discarded in things called sheet middens. So, they're just thrown on the ground. Sometimes even, you can see the spread from the back doorway. If you didn't know there was a doorway there, you'd almost be able to predict there was a doorway based on the spread.
The other thing we were looking for there was evidence of occupation before the Brown house. So, the early log cabin. That is the normal sequence of settlements in Ontario. You would have a shanty or a log cabin, maybe a squared log house, brick house, and then stone house. Stone house is pretty rare at this time in the province. That distinguishes the Brown house is something unusual. People of means, farmers of means, but we didn't find any evidence of a log cabin. Again, you have to ask yourself, “Okay, well, is it off the study area?” It could be on the property, but just not within the study area.
But there's one candidate, I think, we did dig beside the John Norton Cabin, and we found some of the oldest artefacts were found on the east side of the John Norton Cabin. As you know, we explored one of our test pits that was deep, it was almost a meter deep. We explored that with a one by one meter square. We found more early artefacts, that's where we found the only smoking pipe. We found some of the earliest ceramics called creamware, late 18th century, early 19th century right there. Some of the oldest ceramics were found on the east side of the Norton Cabin, along with modern materials like plastic, and pieces of blue tarp, polyethylene tarp, or propylene tarp.
It's a mixed deposit, but the mixture is from, ironically, the placement of the historic John Norton Cabin may have disturbed an early site. The relocation of an historic building on an earlier historic site may have resulted in the partial displacement of artefacts or even destruction of that, or partial destruction of that early site. That's the only candidate for a log cabin, just based on the types of artefacts that we found even though they're in a mixed context. For that reason, part of what the stage two does is recommend areas to be cleared and areas that require further investigation.
[00:30:09] AH: Is that an area that you think would rise to that level in this case? Or do you think we just didn't find enough to justify taking it to the next level? Just to build on what you were saying as well, that was found, an area right wedged between two of the most disturbed areas on the site. One was the pond that was dug in the late 1930s, on the one side, and then what is now the foundation and basement at the Norton Cabin, which was brought here in the 1990s was placed on, that was dug in the 1990s. So, it was a bit of an awkward spot.
[00:30:38] JT: Yes. It's an awkward spot, but it's still able to be investigated. What I've recommended in the report is that there's a zone, two zones that require monitoring during mechanical excavation, if and when that should take place. It's an area that, in a way, it's protected. You don't call it a protection zone, but it's an area that if there's going to be any further disturbance, an archaeologist would just monitor the excavation. That means watching the machines excavate, looking through samples of the back dirt, trying to recover any artefacts. If something is found, then you can stop excavation, and investigate further and decide what to do stage three, or even stage four, if you were to find evidence of a log cabin, for instance.
The other zone is around the house in the back laneway, the north side. So, if any excavation is to take place around the house, there's that zone that would again be monitored by a licenced archaeologist if any excavation is to take place. In a way, it recognizes the fact that those areas weren't tested and they’re potentially significant. Really, when you do this kind of consulting archaeology, that's the purpose of the archaeal – clear the property, if there's no further archaeological concerns. Or if there's potential for a site to be found, then that's a stage three, you would do a different methodology for at stage three, to identify the type of site cultural affiliation. And then if it's something very significant that has cultural heritage value or interest, that's the ministry term for that, then you would do a stage four even, which is full mitigation of the site, before development takes place.
[00:32:17] AH: When we talk about these artefacts, I’m reminded of a term I learned working with you, which is a legacy collection. We have one of those here. What that is, in our case is different pieces, artefacts, and things that have been found over time, either in work that we've been doing, or even previous residents of the site gardening and things like that. I know I mentioned to you there's an area on the west side of the house, the oldest part of the house where I – whenever I seemed to put a shovel in the ground, I found something. So, we have a collection of things like that as well. And I think that may be familiar to a lot of people in Niagara. I've certainly spoken with other people who have older homes and so on, who talk about the interesting things they find in their garden when they're out tending the roses.
[00:32:58] JT: Yes, so legacy collections are very important because there are artefacts that are associated with the property. They belong here. They tell part of the story of the property. They can't be discounted because they weren't dug by an archaeologist. They have context, and they have meaning because of that.
Legacy collections can also be for pre-contact or indigenous finds. A lot of people, farmers, when they find artefacts in their fields, as they're plowing, they collect them and maybe have them in a shoebox, in a closet, and they show people. That's a legacy collection. There’s a real effort to record those collections because they still have – especially if the farmer knows where they were found, and quite often they do, they can tell you exactly where they were found. Those have meaning. It's the distribution and the types of finds that still have context that then have meaning. Legacy collections are very important.
[00:33:49] AH: Now, someone out there is out working in the garden and finds something that they think is particularly interesting or different or potentially rare, what do you recommend they do with it?
[00:33:58] JT: If they find something like that, the best thing to do is to contact the Ministry, and you would just go on Archaeology Ontario, and it would direct you to the Ministry. There'll be contact information there. You can report it. If it's something significant, then the Ministry may decide to pass it on to a consultant archaeologist, even if pictures are taken. I get this all the time, when I was at the University, people would find things and they would send me pictures, and we can give them information just based on the photograph quite often. Contact people at universities, that's also one way to handle it. The main thing is to report it and there's different avenues for reporting it.
[00:34:37] AH: Now, as we talked about, we're hoping to move on to the metal section of the property. Hopefully next year, the area where there's no history of structures, primarily agricultural use, and we talked about the different approach that we'll be taking is plowing and then walking the field. That's a good time to mention that if anyone listening is interested in participating in that, and they'd like to sign up for the next stage of this process, or even learn more about some of the other opportunities, we have to get involved, we encourage you to check out our website, thebrownhomestead.ca, or to send us an email at volunteer@thebrownhomestead.ca.
Now, some people may want to get even more involved in that. So, on their behalf, I'm going to say, I'm going to ask you, John, to people listening who may be interested in becoming an archaeologist. What advice do you give people who are looking at as a potential career?
[00:35:27] JT: Yes. We actually had a couple of people who were thinking about that, or who had thought about it when they were younger, and they didn't know really how to pursue it. So, university training is where you get a Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology. There's different departments. You can have a Department of Anthropology that archaeology falls under. At Wilfrid Laurier University, it was the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies. We talk about the things that we've been talking about here. You can do it and you can do part-time studies if you're young and you want to do a degree. Or if you're older, and you want to do a degree, part time, full time, that's the way to pursue it.
There's organizations that you can become involved with. So, the Ontario Archaeological Society is a good organization that has been around for decades. For people who were not academics, or academics, sometimes there's excavations that are going on run by the OAS. Or they would know of people who may be conducting excavations that have registered with the OAS that say, they're taking volunteers. Consultants sometimes take volunteers. I know people were asking me, if I was doing anything, could I please let them know. So that's really up to the consultant. In some cases, it's appropriate. In other cases, it's not so appropriate. I try to do it whenever I can. So, I enjoy doing public archaeology like this project was. I hope I get a chance to do that with some of these people in the future.
[00:36:50] AH: It's certainly understandable, though, there may be some sites that are a little too sensitive for the untrained and uneducated like me to be fooling around on.
[00:36:59] JT: Well, anybody can be trained. But yes, some sites can be sensitive.
[00:37:03] AH: I don't know. My wife says I'm untrainable. I don't think she's talking about archaeology, but I don't know what she means.
[00:37:08] JT: Probably not.
[00:37:10] AH: Yes, I think we've already established that the word retired has something of a different meaning in your case, and you always seem to have one or more fantastic projects on the go. What's next for you? What do you have on the horizon?
[00:37:21] JT: Well, yeah, my wife, Lisabeth teaches that at a school in Ohio. She teaches a course and we've done courses in archaeology there. We may revive that. I'm going to be working on a project at Old Fort Erie, myself. I live in Fort Erie and I did a field school at the old, old fort, which is the British Fort built in 1764. It's currently all underground, under a parking lot. And I'm talking to the Niagara Parks Commission about how that can be interpreted. That's something on the horizon for me. Lisabeth will probably help out with that, too. She's a trained historian. So, she's great for doing all that background work.
[00:37:59] AH: Yes, let's not overlook her. It was great to meet her and have her be part of the team as well. She was invaluable to our project, as I'm sure she is to many of yours. Those are some great projects that are coming up and we wish you the best of luck with those. We'll be watching to see what you come up with next and hope to have you back next year for the next steps here.
Thank you so much for all your hard work here at the homestead and also for taking the time here today to talk a little more about what we did and, and share with an even wider part of the community that we have visiting us during the work.
[00:38:31] JT: It was a real pleasure, Andrew, and I'm looking forward to future involvement.
[00:38:35] AH: There’s always exciting stuff going on here too. So, we love to have you anytime. Thanks a lot, John.
[00:38:40] JT: Thanks very much.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:38:42] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening. Subscribe today so you won’t miss our next episode. Remember, as Andrew said, if you would like to get involved in our next archaeological dig, or a project like it, we’re waiting to hear from you. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and show ideas. Reach out to us at thebrownhomestead.ca on social media, or if you still like to do things the you can even email us at opendoor@thebrownhomestead.ca.
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