I Remember Laurier: Reflections by Retirees on Life at WLU

12. Our Home on Native Land: Digging Up a Pre-Contact Site (and Beyond)

How did a member of the waterloo lutheran seminary faculty, teaching liturgics (worship) and preaching, become involved in pre-contact archaeology anyway? Well, it was like this. In the 1960s an expansionist climate permeated the new Waterloo Lutheran University that had replaced Waterloo College at the start of that decade.We were a university now, and new disciplines and developments beckoned. Because the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and Waterloo Lutheran Seminary shared many interests, it seemed to make sense to work more closely together in what became the School of Religion and Culture. In the late 1960s Norman Wagner, the moving force behind this development , opened an intriguing door. Norman, a specialist in Ancient Near Eastern literature and archaeology,called together Lawrence Toombs (an internationally recognized expert in Near Eastern archaeology), Frank Turner (head of the Faculty of Social Work), and me to consider a threepart program focused on Aboriginal people. He envisioned archaeology as the beginning (he and Toombs), followed by study of Aboriginal religion (Riegert), and proceeding to study of the contemporary issues of Aboriginal peoples (Turner). Intriguing—and daunting, for we were to take on these tasks on top of our regular schedules! A research grant to begin working on a site was obtained from the Lutheran Church in America, the church body with which the seminary was associated at the time, and plans for a systematic excavation of a site Chapter 12  Our Home on Native Land: Digging Up a Pre-Contact Site (and Beyond) eduard r. riegert 60 went into full swing in 1970. Dean Knight, a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Toronto, helped with selection of what became known as the Moyer Site and with the organization and conduct of the first season’s dig. Prominent Canadian archaeologists George MacDonald and Jim Wright encouraged exploration of the site and helped with analysis of artifacts. Named after the landowners, the Blake Moyers, the site is located some three kilometres northeast of New Dundee, Ontario, about an hour’s drive from WLU. A camp was established in a neighbouring orchard, a laboratory was created in a house on Bricker Street, and in May the dig began. While Norman Wagner exercised general supervision of the project, Dean Knight was field director in 1970, Larry Toombs in 1971, and Clarke Mecredy in 1972. Aboriginal sites in Waterloo County had been recorded in archaeological literature since the late 1800s; the presence of flint and ceramic artifacts at Moyer suggested a possible midden (garbage dump), which would presume a settlement. This supposition was proved correct in 1970 with a series of exploratory trenches that revealed not only a midden but also post moulds (dark stains below the plowed layer of soil) in a continuous line, which proved the existence of a longhouse wall. Excavations in the next two years revealed the extent of the settlement, two more middens, ten longhouses, and parts of a palisade. It is one thing to find artifacts, post moulds, hearths, middens, and such, and to map each find accurately; it is quite another to analyse, identify, and record each and every artifact and ceramic shard. Artifacts can be measured, photographed, and drawn; pottery analysis is much more intricate because of the wealth of decoration and shapes. The ultimate aim, though, is to be able to compare the artifacts of one site with those of other sites and so, slowly and laboriously, to discover and date whole cultural areas. Obviously, the analysis, description, and classification of artifacts results in a vast amount of information. Norman was enamored of the new capabilities for recording and analysing data made possible with the computer (a Honeywell had recently been put in place at WLU). Knowing that the full coding of artifacts for storage and analysis by computer had begun in Ontario archaeology, he was eager to develop a code for cataloguing the data from our site. This he and Larry proceeded to eduard r. riegert 61 do; an early example of the application of the new technology to archaeology , it is part of the report of the dig, The Moyer Site: A Pre-Historic Village in Waterloo County (1974), authored by Norman, Larry, and myself. (The book was one of the two inaugural publications of the embryonic Wilfrid Laurier University Press.) For example, the collars of the ceramic vessels discovered on-site took, in cross-section, at least...