ST. ALBERT: Sophia Capello gently brushes dirt off of a treasure half-buried in the earth. It’s a shard of pottery, brown and mottled white and black like a crab’s shell, which probably hasn’t seen the light in decades.
“This here is our big piece of ceramic,” said the University of Alberta archaeology student. She and her teammates found it the day before, and it’s their biggest find yet at this St. Albert study site.
But despite being right there in front of her, Capello says she can’t just go and pluck this artifact out of the ground. She has to excavate the dirt around it a centimetre at a time, checking for contextual clues as to how the shard got here.
The earth has stories to tell. Capello and her teammates are in St. Albert this month to document them with trowels, brushes, and patience.
Unearthing history
Capello is one of about 16 post-secondary students taking part in the U of A’s 2023 Indigenous Archeology Field School this month just south of the grain elevators on Meadowview Drive.
The school, which started May 29, aims to show students the basics of archeology, such as digging, mapping, and detecting, said field school supervisor Kisha Supernant, who is also the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archeology at the U of A. Supernant is known for her work with ground-penetrating radar and unmarked graves at former residential school sites, and helped investigate five sites in St. Albert in 2021. Students in the school are studying two sites in River Lots 23 and 24, which were inhabited by Métis and First Nations peoples for centuries.
“There has been very little archaeology done on river lots anywhere in the country,” Supernant said.
Supernant said this could be because the river lots are tied to the Métis, whom historians have long ignored in favour of European settlers and First Nations — an oversight, given the vital role the Métis played in Canada’s fur trade and post-contact history.
Supernant asked the Arts and Heritage Foundation of St. Albert last year if she could run a field school at a site with Métis roots, said Christina Hardie, public programs and heritage sites manager with the foundation. They settled on these two river lots, which had been occupied by Métis families such as the Cunninghams (the namesake of Cunningham Road) since at least the 1870s.
Supernant said her students are excavating a suspected barn site and a possible cellar/dump site.
“Dumps are gold mines for archaeologists,” Supernant said.
“We can learn a lot about what (people) were eating, what they were drinking, and the kinds of activities they were doing from the materials in the dump.”
This particular site could reveal insights into Métis family life not captured in historic accounts, said field school participant Alixaundria Lamothe.
“I would love to find beads or toys, but honestly everything is exciting to find.”
Supernant said she and her students already had pretty good ideas on where to dig on these river lots because of detailed historic records. If this had been an unexplored site, the students would have scanned the area with drone-mounted multi-spectrum cameras and ground-penetrating radar to spot chemical and vegetative changes indicative of human activity and suspicious shapes underground such as graves. After that, the students would have done some test digs before setting up formal survey plots.
Survey plots consist of one-metre-square pits, Lamothe said. The students divide the pits into quadrants and excavate each 10 centimetres at a time to a total depth of one metre using hand trowels, taking note of soil conditions and artifacts as they encounter them. Bone fragments go into paper bags to prevent rot from moisture, while metal, glass, and ceramic ones go into plastic.
Cade Bara, a member of the Coldwater Indian Band in B.C., sifts dirt from those pits through a mesh screen to find smaller artifacts missed by the diggers.
“It’s kind of like time travel,” he said. “You get to go back in time through the soil.”
Supernant said the modern nature of Métis artifacts often makes them easier to identify than ones from more ancient civilizations — anyone can recognize a fork, but few can recognize a flint knife or stone tool. Métis artifacts also tend to be made out of glass or ceramic, which are easier to preserve than other materials. Archaeologists can learn a lot by studying the design, composition, context, and contents of these artifacts.
“It’s really a lot like putting together a puzzle but we only have a very small portion of the pieces," Supernant said.
“It’s a lot of connecting the dots and looking at patterns.”
Cultural connections
Many of the students at the school have Indigenous roots. Students start each day with smudge ceremonies, learn area history from local Métis elders, and are encouraged to treat artifacts with respect, as they were once owned by actual people.
Lamothe, who is Métis, said it is important to have Métis archaeologists researching this Métis site.
“It’s our history, our story, our families and our ancestors who were on these lots,” she said — history non-Indigenous researchers might not appreciate as much.
It makes a big difference to have Indigenous people doing archeology, said Supernant, who has Métis roots in St. Albert. Indigenous descendants can help archaeologists better understand the significance of recovered artifacts, while Indigenous archaeologists can pursue answers to questions non-Indigenous ones don’t think to ask.
“It also makes it more ethical,” she continued.
There’s a lot of debate among archaeologists right now on what should happen with the material they recover, Supernant said. Instead of just tossing them in a museum, there’s now a push to give Indigenous communities a say in what happens to their ancestors’ belongings. While the artifacts this school recovers will initially go to the Royal Alberta Museum, Supernant said she is discussing their final fate with the Arts and Heritage Foundation and her Métis relatives.
A descendent of the Cunningham family, Hardie said this school has renewed her interest in her Métis heritage. Seeing local students make immediate connections to local history by speaking with the archaeologists at the site has also brought tears to her eyes.
“Indigenous history is Canadian history,” she said.
“It is the story of the land beneath us.”
The field school wraps up June 23. Residents can visit it from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sundays. Supernant and the students will host two “Métis Trash Talking” events about their work at the site on June 15 and 21. Tickets are $5. Visit www.artsandheritage.ca and put “trash” into the search bar for details.
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