were thought likely to be found in large numbers as a result of the building of railway lines. Daniel Wilson contributed numerous general articles about Canadian and European archaeology to the institute’s Canadian Journal, which was founded in 1852, including a plea for the formation of a collection of prehistoric crania.

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Steep cliffs stand at the area of Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada. Here Native Americans hunted and killed buffalo by driving the panic-stricken beasts over the cliff edge, producing a huge buffalo graveyard.

(Paul A. Souders/Corbis)

In 1884, William Boyle, a Scottish-born schoolteacher and bookstore owner, became the archaeological curator at the Canadian Institute Museum and incorporated his own extensive collection of Indian artifacts into that institution. In 1887, he received a small salary from funds supplied by the Ontario government, which made him the first professional archaeologist in Canada. The same year Boyle began editing the Annual Archaeological Report for Ontario, which continued to be published until 1928. This was Canada’s first archaeological journal. When Boyle died in 1911, the archaeological material he had collected, and which had been moved to the Ontario Provincial Museum in 1897, consisted of 32,000 artifacts from across southern Ontario. Boyle classified these finds according to provenience, material, and assumed use. He developed a close working relationship with the professional archaeologists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and trained a small group of amateur archaeologists to carry out investigations across Ontario. The most successful of these was Andrew Hunter, who recorded 637 sites in Simcoe County (the location of the Jesuits’ seventeenth-century Huron missions), assigning them, according to the presence or absence of European goods, to either prehistoric or historical times.

European settlement and archaeology began considerably later west of Ontario. The first burial mounds were recorded in Manitoba in 1867, and in the 1880s and 1890s, there was growing interest in these mounds on the part of local amateur archaeologists and visiting scientists who generally interpreted them in terms of