December 5th, 2012

Post date: Jan 18, 2013 6:57:06 PM

On Wednesday we held our annual holiday goodie feast with hot drinks for everyone to partake of. It was actually an unusual evening in that we had more archaeologists present than interested members of the public! We had fellow OAS members from the Hamilton area who were here to work on a local dig site in Puce and we had members from the Toronto area who were down to give Rosemarie her Killarney Award, a reward for longstanding involvement in the OAS. Rosemarie Denunzio has an amazing 32 years in with the Ontario Archaeological Society! A special thank you to Rosemarie for all that she has done to champion archaeology in our area over the years! Thank you Rosemarie!

Our presenter for our last meeting of 2012 was none other than our very own president, Amanda Black. Amanda spoke about some research she had performed when she was a student at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. She was performing a site update of CcHh-1, the Hudson Bay Post No. 1. (CcHh-1 is the Borden number given to the site. Borden numbers are given to every archaeological site in Canada and help to distinguish where they are located.)

The main objective of Amanda’s research was to determine the amount of disturbance that has occurred on the site over the years, both natural and cultural, since the site was originally examined by Laurentian University in 1973. She also wished to locate the so called root cellar that was suppose to be on site but was poorly documented.

In the end Amanda was unable to locate the elusive root cellar and found that the site was in no immediate threat of destruction. She recommended that the site be dug purely for the information that it holds and could be used as an instructional site for student archaeologists as well as members of the public.

One artifact that was supposed to have been found during the original excavation that stirred up those who were present for Amanda’s presentation was a glass fire extinguisher. She unfortunately did not have a picture of the artifact and it led me to look up what these extinguishers were. Below is a picture of one such extinguishers: