Digging in Ottawa’s dirt

There is an exhibit in a museum in the ancient city of York, England, which is several feet below ground. It depicts village life as it would have been a thousand plus years ago, when the Vikings settled there after some dedicated pillaging in the area. The museum is on the exact site of the discovery in the 1970s of several Viking homes and thousands of their daily artifacts. The question that struck me at the time as I proceeded through the exhibits was, “How come we are below ground?’ The answer was, that this was once street level. Time had buried everything.

It probably takes a millennium or two for a city to go through the several cycles of the infrastructure raze and rise necessary to create additional layers of time, debris and soil, and provide archaeologists with an interesting larder to carefully unpack. Ottawa is about a thousand years short of having the archaeological head start that York has, but already time has stocked our foundation with some interesting discoveries.

Such fascinations as the small-track, entire train discovered in a closed tunnel under LeBreton Flats; the inch of ash also on the Flats a metre down that is the enduring evidence of the Great Fire of 1900; the bones of the bowhead whale that were discovered when they were building the airport, and so on. History is another country; they do things differently there, and the delight of archeology is discovering quite how they did them, with nary a computer chip or a car in sight.

This August, shortly to close, has been Archaeology Month in the Capital. Across the river in Quebec, they have a strong interest in archeology (they have a city that just celebrated four hundred years of existence) and several years ago they launched a month dedicated to their downstairs discoveries and it has grown each year. This year for the first time mois de l’archéo jumped the river and became archeology month in Ottawa. The relevant website to see what the remainder of the month has to offer is www.archaeomonth.com. When I scrolled through I noticed there was an exhibition still on at City Hall, and I headed toward it.

Arriving at City Hall, I walked past the standing ceramic sculptures by the late Jim Thompson, that now have display cabinets set in the wall behind them of some of his other works, past a row of certificates of some of those who have received the keys to the city, presumably useful if we ever have to go into lockdown, and inquired as to the whereabouts of the archaeological display.

The young gentleman at the desk, after several inquisitive manoeuvres inside his computer screen, raised his right arm and pointed at the answer. “It’s that over there by the wall.” The wall in question was about 10 steps away.

My first reaction was, well, that’s not much, and it was a first impression that didn’t disperse. Clearly I was looking at an MBA, a minimal budget attempt. A chorus line of glass cases set in tables were interspersed with billboards acting as explanatory pages with text and small photos. At the bottom of three of the billboards were unlabelled photos of students involved in archaeological digs somewhere, presumably in the city. The first case, sat next to a bannered timeline of the European classification of First Peoples, of the woodlanders, from paleo-Indian up to present, was mostly filled with arrow heads and pottery shards, and most of those, I deduced from the fairly skimpy accompanying text, had been found elsewhere.

There was mention of some projectile points, circa 3000 to 1300 years Before Present, found in Vincent Massey Park and a pottery shard found at Constance Bay that was 2400 years old. In other words, they were turning out attractive useful pottery around here when Romulus, the first king of Rome, was busy dividing the year into 10 months.

Each of the remaining glass cases was dedicated to an area of the city where artifacts had been unearthed, namely LeBreton Flats, Gloucester, and the Billings Estate (from a 1981 survey of the grounds.) Shoes, keys, small toys, hardware, the orphaned artifacts of daily life. One of the banners explained that there was once a village of Hawthorne in Gloucester, southwest of Ottawa and annexed to the city in 1947. Within the case were artifacts from the village, including two musket balls, one fired, the other not. I spent a moment speculating on the circumstances under which the ball had been fired.

The speculations rapidly de-escalated from jealous murder to a rabbit hunt.

There was mention of, and perhaps photos pertaining to, artifacts on the other banners I would have liked to have seen. A 1909 loaf of bread from the Dompierre & Co. bakery, and an 1844 half-penny. Certainly my perennial thirst for historical tidbits about Ottawa was revived by this exhibition, but not sated. It only received a few drops, not the canteen full it was looking for. A visit to the Bytown Museum will take care of that.

I’m going to be generous and call this first year of archeology month in general, and the City Hall display in particular, a reasonable start.

Ottawa is not a city known for its respect for history — it usually makes the headlines as a political convenience or a development road block, but a permanent display at City Hall resulting from this year’s teaser would be a good outcome. Starting, perhaps, with a retrospective of previous City Halls. Digging in that dirt would be fun.