As Grade 7 student Ryan Higgins sifted soil through a screen — panning for pieces of the past — he spotted one little stone that didn’t look quite natural.
“I rubbed it with my glove to get some of the dirt off, and that’s when I saw the point,” he said, showing off the clearly sharpened edge on the head of what seems to be a small fieldstone chisel — still sharp after almost 700 years.
What this Oshawa student held in his palm Wednesday on a secret field north of Pickering is part of a treasure trove of ancient tools, bones and pottery left by a settlement of Huron Wendat people between 1275 and 1325, centuries before Europeans arrived.
What makes this archaeological site so different is that it is being explored almost exclusively by students — some as young as Grade 4 — through an unusual course run for Durham Region’s Catholic schools by teacher Catherine MacDonald, with the full blessing and help of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, which leases the land, overseas the digging and reports every pottery sherd found to the record-keepers at Queen’s Park.
And they all must promise to keep the location secret, to avoid looters on this cultural preserve.
“It’s cool — archaeology isn’t usually a school subject,” said Ryan, a student at Oshawa’s St. Joseph Catholic School, one of 40 that send middle school students each year for a day of digging with MacDonald, staff from the conservation authority and university student volunteers. In preparation, they do archaeology research projects and go to a three-day “archaeology camp” that teaches them to use the very same care when exploring an ancient dig as police use in modern crime-scene investigation.
“Archaeology is one of the most perfect subjects because it’s interdisciplinary; it blends geography, ethics, history, politics, legal issues — and you problem-solve hands-on,” said MacDonald. “You’re carefully shoveling one to two centimetres, peeling back layers in time; it’s like time travel. But you have to work with a team and test hypotheses. It brings it all together: the math of measuring, history, science.”
And it’s a different way to learn about the past than through books.
“We think history is the written word, yet it’s only been the last few hundred years that the majority of people could read and write, so most people left their history behind through objects,” MacDonald noted.
A lifelong archaeology buff, MacDonald’s program to get schoolchildren literally into the field — digging, searching for clues and pondering the stories they tell — has won her two of Canada’s top teaching awards: the Premier’s Award in 2009 and the Governor-General’s Award in 2013.
The lessons are full of surprises. Moments after Ryan’s find, another group discovered a tiny copper bead, which MacDonald said suggests there was trade with peoples from north of Lake Superior.
A burnt kernel of corn tells students these people cultivated crops, which means they weren’t nomadic hunters all year round.
But a single row of post marks in the deep soil has field director Janice Teichroeb puzzled. Two parallel rows would suggest the walls of a longhouse, but one diagonal row “seems like a mystery; they didn’t really have palisades for protection from enemies that early, because there really wasn’t a lot of warfare.” Maybe a smaller fence to keep animals at bay?
Graham Anderson, a Grade 7 student at Whitby’s St. Theresa Catholic School, said “it’s cool because it’s all really small stuff that we find, but it can change everything if you find something you didn’t expect.” One group found a belt buckle, likely from settlers who farmed the land more recently.
Noted Grade 8 student Tom Parapilly of St. James Catholic School in Ajax: “You really experience the history here that’s not written about in the history books — because they didn’t write about anything except the European and French.”
MacDonald also stresses the painstaking care needed to record every artifact.
“They have this pop-culture image of archaeology from Indiana Jones, but they learn it’s hard work and the scientific method, and you’ve got to record everything.
“It’s not just being chased by bad guys.”
Correction - May 8, 2014: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the given name of Ryan Higgins.