Antiquarian Beginnings

It is recorded that Indian stone tools were dug up in the course of construction work in southern quebec at various times during the seventeenth century. In 1700, workmen unearthed some magnificent ground slate projectile points at Bécancour. These finds, now known to date from the Archaic period (3000–2000 b.c.), were preserved at the Ursuline convent in nearby Trois-Rivières and constitute Canada’s oldest archaeological collection.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, farmers and other interested British colonists in southern Ontario and the Maritimes began to assemble private collections of Indian artifacts. Relic hunters also pillaged Indian burial sites to recover such materials. Only brief accounts of these activities were recorded in local newspapers and British journals.

The most sustained archaeological work of this period was initiated by two Jesuit priests soon after members of that order returned to Quebec in 1842. Father Jean-Pierre Chazelle identified the stone ruins of two seventeenth-century Jesuit missions in southern Ontario, and following in his footsteps, first Father Felix Martin and then Professor Joseph-Charles Tache of the University of Laval explored the Huron Indian sites around these missions. Apart from this work, there was little concern with archaeology in French-speaking Quebec. Unlike English Canadian farmers, French Canadian ones were uninterested in the artifacts they unearthed in the course of their farming operations.

After 1853, two leading Canadian scholars studied and wrote about archaeology. daniel wilson, a Scottish archaeologist who eventually became president of the University of Toronto, and John William Dawson, a Nova Scotian geologist who was principal of McGill University in Montreal. Both did archaeological work in Canada in the 1850s and early 1860s, and Wilson asserted that his ambition was to become “a Canadian antiquary.” Yet both men’s interests soon became more broadly anthropological. Despite their many anthropological publications that incorporated archaeological data, neither of these eminent scholars made a tangible contribution to the development of archaeology in Canada.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Canadians remained largely preoccupied with practical matters, and it was expected that gifted individuals would apply their talents to public life. Pursuits such as archaeology were not viewed as suitable full-time occupations for men of ability. Academics were few in number and so deeply involved in political and religious controversies that they had little time for archaeology.

Even so, in the second half of the nineteenth century, natural history, literary, and historical societies were founded, or became more active, in Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, and St. John, New Brunswick. These societies played a major role in drawing their members’ attention to archaeological developments in Europe and the United States, and their journals made possible the publication of archaeological research. In 1863, members of the Nova Scotian Institute of Natural Science were inspired to excavate local shell mounds by the Swiss archaeologist Adolf Morlot’s report of Danish shell-mound investigations published in the widely distributed Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1860. In 1884, the Natural History Society of New Brunswick published George Matthew’s account of a stratified shell midden at Bocabec, New Brunswick; the best excavation carried out by a Canadian in the nineteenth century. Although numerous studies of the archaeology of the Maritime Provinces were published locally in the late nineteenth century, no specifically archaeological positions were established in universities or museums in that part of Canada. In Quebec, only a small number of archaeological studies were published, mainly by English-speaking residents of Montreal. A few brief notes on archaeological finds appeared in Le Naturaliste Canadien in the 1880s.

Developments of more lasting importance for Canadian archaeology centered on the Canadian Institute (later the Royal Canadian Institute) founded in Toronto in 1849 by provincial land surveyors and other professionals wishing to promote the advancement of the natural sciences and the arts. In 1852, the institute issued a circular drafted by Sandford Fleming, civil engineer and future inventor of standard time, urging the reporting of Indian sites that