Toronto’s archeological treasures still buried — but not in the ground
Archeologist Ron Williamson displays the ancient treasures that came from his firm’s storage room — 500- year- old tools made of animal bone, pipes the same age made of clay, and a decorative bead carved from shell. They’re just a fraction of the artifacts stored in banker boxes at Archaeological Services Inc. on Bathurst St.
The firm has hundreds of boxes stored on site and even more at other facilities, boxes containing Euro- Canadian and Indigenous artifacts that ASI’s archeologists are bound, by the terms of their Ontario licence, to hold in trust for the people of this province each time they are hired to carry out an archeological assessment or excavation.
During a lifetime, an archeologist can amass hundreds of boxes, storing them in garages, basement and lockers, or in the storage rooms of the institutions and firms they work for. Williamson estimates there are at least 20,000 boxes of arti- f facts being stored by archeologists in the province.
Ontario is one of the few jurisdictions in North America that don’t require that the artifacts go into a central storage facility, where they would be available to researchers and kept safe. Williamson, who founded ASI in 1980, has been championing a central repository for years.
“We have the strongest legislation in North America for pulling this stuff out of the ground prior to development, so it’s not destroyed by development,” says Williamson. “We have the weakest legislation for what to do with the stuff.”
In Toronto, city staff looked at centralizing storage for about 3,500 boxes related to City of Toronto- based digs that are now in the hands of individual archeologists, or the government agencies or firms they worked for. Some are being stored by the city itself.
But a staff report issued last fall said it was too expensive to convert an existing building into a storage facility big enough to hold them, plus take new material for the next 10 years.
Instead, council adopted a motion in December that recommended the collections be sent to Sustainable Archaeology, a purpose- built facility in Hamilton, with a 30,000- box capacity that is part of McMaster University. A sister facility in London’s Western University has room for 50,000 more, both built using government grants. The Hamilton arm has remained virtually empty until recently.
“They have space, they have staff, they have long- term curation of archeological collections,” says Wayne Reeves, Toronto’s chief curator. “We think that this is more feasible than struggling to find the dollars internally to reinvent the wheel to create a stand- alone Toronto facility,” he says.
“The really critical thing is that they’re no longer being held in potentially dodgy storage facilities, seeing no management and even more importantly, with no public access.”
The city would continue to store artifacts related to the 10 museums it runs in its existing museum collections centre, and transfer the rest to Sustainable Archaeology. None of the Toronto- run museums are dedicated to the city’s Indigenous history.
One of the hurdles facing Toronto’s plan is the lack of government regulation requiring archeologists to deposit artifacts in a central repository. The other hurdle is the cost.
Sustainable Archaeology charges $ 150 to $ 900 a box, depending on how much processing is needed. They may need to be cleaned, identified, tagged and bagged before being repackaged in a corrugated plastic box. The boxes have radio frequency tags so that monitors at the warehouse door can track when they’re moved in or out. The facility also has state- of- the- art research labs. The processing charge covers the cost of cataloguing items and ensures that the facility is sustainable far into the future, when the shelves are full.
“The province needs to take leadership by saying we’re going to implement guidelines on how these collections should be managed once they’re recovered from the ground,” says Reeves, RR and “create some sort of a funding program to assist a archeologists to move their collections to repositories like Sustainable Archaeology. And this is really key.”
In other jurisdictions, the cost is usually passed on to whatever ee developer, institution or government agency has hired t the archeologist to do the work.
“It is expected that legacy collections ( those already in the hands of archeologists) will require additional care and expense to bring their curation up to acceptable standards in some cases,” Susan Hughes, project manager for the City of Toronto’s TT Heritage Preservation Services, said in an email. “Staff will also be looking to the province ... for direction and potential funding to accomplish any additional work associated with these collections. These collections are, however, part of the overall planning for the project.”
For decades, archeologists have been holding, in trust, the treasures they find in the dirt— often in lockers or in their basements. Archeologist Ron Williamson urges an end to this haphazard practice, which puts the artifacts at risk. A two-page map on IN6-7 retraces what some of the these artifacts reveal about the city's Indigenous roots
“We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ancestors that are in boxes in universities, and government buildings.” LOUIS LESAGE DIRECTOR OF THE NIONWENTSIO OFFICE OF THE HURON-WENDAT NATION IN WENDACKE, QUE.
In Toronto, where the city’s bylaws call for an assessment of lands deemed archeologically significant in advance of development, evidence of Indigenous people dates back thousands of years. There are about 400 known archeological sites in the city and about half are Indigenous. There have been excavations to some degree at all of them.
There are more sites across southern Ontario, many along the Lake Ontario shoreline or close to rivers and creeks.
Some of the artifacts have already gone out with the trash.
One collection was lost when an archeologist in the Peterborough area died suddenly and the items he was storing in his apartment were thrown out.
And hundreds of boxes containing artifacts — some colonial but largely Indigenous — were lost in 2003 when a tunnel at U of T’s Scarborough campus was cleared out and the items were sent to a Michigan landfill.
“It was a terrible accident,” says ASI’s Williamson.
The lack of access to the artifacts, and information about them, is a sensitive oversight for the Indigenous community.
“We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ancestors that are in boxes in universities, and government buildings,” says Louis Lesage, director of the Nionwentsio (Lands and Resources) office of the Huron-Wendat Nation in Wendacke, Que. More than 1,700 of their ancestors’ remains were reburied in Vaughan in 2013, remains that were stored in boxes at U of T for decades.
The city estimates that artifacts from more than 300 sites are in the hands of individual archeologists or their firms, or stored by Ontario Heritage Trust, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, the Toronto District School Board or the city itself. There are dozens more where the whereabouts of artifacts are unknown, or have been destroyed.
Agencies like the TRCA have their own storage facilities, in this case a temperature-controlled room where they store hundreds of boxes. Most artifacts are shards, dug up on conservation land in advance of infrastructure projects, and not museum-quality pieces. The conservation authority uses the artifacts to do education and outreach, and runs a summer field school for high school students. They’re considering starting another for adults.
“I think that the fact that the TRCA has their own repository sort of mitigates the requirement for them to move the artifacts to another facility,” says Janice Teichroeb, an archeologist there.
Even the provincial transport ministry has artifacts stored in offices across southern Ontario. The ministry had an in-house archeological operation but outsourced it in the mid-’90s. It now hires consultant archaeologists who are responsible for the material.
Perhaps even more confusing is that excavations from one site could be in the hands of many different archeologists or institutions.
Williamson’s firm has already paid to transfer 500 boxes to Sustainable Archaeology’s London branch.
“We just felt it had to happen,” says Williamson, who sits on SA’s board. “But most people can’t afford to do that. Most companies can’t afford to do that.” His firm has also sent several hundred to various museums over the past 20 years.
Lesage, who is a member of Sustainable Archaeology’s First Nation Advisory Circle, says the facility is not the perfect solution, but it’s preferable for now.
“It’s a better situation knowing all of those artifacts can be concentrated in one place,” says Lesage, who can trace his Huron-Wendat roots back to 1680. “In the near future we will take the time, think about how we will do things. How we can repatriate human remains, for example, or how we can repatriate artifacts in our own community.”