Diggin’ Debert
Ongoing project seeks artifacts from early Indigenous people
A small core sample of sand comes out of the ground and is emptied onto a sifting screen.
Archaeologist Megan MacDonald watches carefully as the sand is emptied onto the screen while another worker begins the sifting process.
Not exactly an Indiana Jones moment, perhaps. But for the archaeology workers at this site, the anticipation of what might be uncovered – after being hidden underground for in excess of 10,000 years – is enough to spur them on through tedious hour after tedious hour.
“It’s enormously exciting for us as archaeologists. To find a site that dates to potentially 10,000 to 13,000 years of age, is amazing,” said Mike Sanders, senior archaeologist with the Cultural Resource Management Group from Halifax.
The project is a longstanding effort underway within the Debert Air Industrial Park. The goal is to find further evidence of human life dating to the tail end of the Stone Age or Paleolithic Period.
The land is prime development property owned by the Municipality of Colchester County. Despite its value, however, – both to potential developers and county tax base alike – no preparation for municipal servicing can proceed until the archaeology team has completed its exploration for any artifacts that lay beneath the surface.
Once done, the land can then be officially authorized, or cleared, for future development.
“We’ve been fairly aggressive with trying to pre-clear land because nobody wants to buy land it if hasn’t been cleared and people don’t have the certainty they can build on it,” said Crawford Mac- pherson, Community Development officer at the municipality.
“We’re trying to be proactive and get this stuff done in advance so that we can say this land is now available for sale.”
Paleolithic artifacts were first discovered in Debert in 1948. Then, during the 1960s, subsequent professional excavations turned up some 28,000 items such as spear points and stone tools indicative of early human life in the area. Those artifacts now are preserved at the Museum of History in Ottawa.
A further find in 1989 “triggered a development of the standards” currently used in the archaeology efforts. This consequently led to other sites that have been found in the general Debert area, Sanders said.
The dig process entails a very systematic, shovel-testing method conducted in a grid pattern of a given property.
“It amounts to just over 2,000 shovel tests,” Sanders said, of the current, 18-acre dig site.
Each dig entails precisely cutting a 40-cm by 40-cm hole with a square-nosed shovel to a depth of 1.2 metres, the most permitted under the Nova Scotia Occupational Health and Safety Act.
From there, the workers use a hand auger to slowly wind down through the earth until it reaches bedrock, which lays at varying depths in each area. Soil samples captured within the specially designed auger are retrieved at every 20-cm and sifted on the surface.
“We’re digging down to glacial soils, the soils that pre-date human occupation,” Sanders said.
At previous nearby digs, the glacial soils were reached at an average of about 60 centimetres. At the current site, however, the required depth varies from about 1.6 metres to about 4 metres (almost the equivalent of a typical storey-and-a-half house.
And, despite the fact the soil consistency in the area is primarily sand, that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges, Sanders said, because of clay in some areas or where sand has “absolutely cemented to hard pan.”
“It’s no different than concrete really, when you get to one of those layers of hardpan. And we have multiple levels of hard pan and we still have to get through it,” he said. “It is very physical work.”
On the other hand, such deep, massive sand deposits also offer “sort of a higher probability for finding stuff.”
At the end of the day, the entire area may well be cleared without finding a single artifact. And, even if something is found, it most likely would be a tiny flake, or flakes, of stone chipped off during a pre-historic tool-making process.
For skeptics who might scoff at the time and expense of the archaeology project, however, Sanders wholeheartedly disagrees.
“These are the first of the first peoples here and that’s the beginning of our known history,” he said. “So it’s powerfully important to be able to detect the sites properly, do the type of analysis that it takes to interpret the site properly and then, eventually, that information will get passed on to Nova Scotians to appreciate the history that they have.”