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A student involved in the 2006 program at Pointe-à-Callière's Archaeological Field School describes her experience
Ever since I was a young girl I have been interested in time travel. I always hoped that someday someone would invent a machine that would let us see and understand all the day-to-day ins and outs of people’s lives in far-off times. I never thought that I would be going on a trip back into the past myself!
But on May 1, 2006, I set out on a five-week adventure, headed for Fort Ville-Marie. What could be more thrilling than to witness 364 years of history? I can already hear you thinking “A time machine? Who is she kidding?”
I admit that I wasn’t able to chat with the craftspeople who rented the 19th-century warehouses, nor the gardeners who tended Callière’s estate, nor the workers who raised the ground level of the point by about 70 cm before erecting the Governor’s mansion there in 1690. I didn’t see the point as it looked in the colony’s first years with my own eyes, or talk to its founders ... but it sometimes felt like I had!
This trip back in time was my first archaeological voyage, and it happened during my training at Pointe-à-Callière's Archaeological Field School in collaboration with the Université du Montréal, on the point of land of the same name. The time machine was none other than me, my trowel, my pick and, of course, plenty of imagination.
I used to imagine that archaeologists could read the soil like the pages of a history book. And why not? Up until that point, I had only heard about archaeology. I had never experienced it first hand, never witnessed the intellectual process involved in understanding a site. If there’s one thing I realized during my five weeks, it is that nothing is that simple. Every bit of data, every little detail has to be taken into account. Digging in the ground is one thing, but understanding what you’re digging up is something else. Understanding the superposition of soil layers is quite a feat, as far as I’m concerned. And then you have to know how to match up the layers with the right period and with the corresponding layers in other dig plots.
Of all the data used in understanding a site during excavations, artifacts are certainly the most obvious. For instance, types of ceramics differ from one period to another. The same applies to nails and pipes. Right from our first days on this voyage back in time, my teammate Jacinthe and I were lucky enough to come across some artifacts that were interesting enough to be catalogued. And our finds led our imaginations, consciously or otherwise, 100, 200 or even 300 years back into the past.
For example, who used this fine yellow 19th-century earthenware chamber pot every night? How did it get broken, and how did it come to be where we found it – in pieces, but almost complete? What did this bottle marked painkiller really hold, and what pains was the person taking it trying to ease? Did it belong to a craftsperson or labourer working in the rented warehouses here? Or was it some passer-by who threw away this empty bottle, which fortunately remained in one piece and came all the way down to us in the present?
Whatever the answers to all these questions, my time travel will always remain an unforgettable experience for me. It introduced me to the archaeological investigative process, the methodology used at a dig site, and above all, strengthened my interest in history. Now that I’m back in the present, I can hardly wait to step back into the past again.
By Marie-Claude Brien, Archaeological Field School trainee
Reference: BRIEN, Marie-Claude, 2006, A student involved in the 2006 program at Pointe-à-Callière's Archaeological Field School describes her experience, The Recruit, vol. 12, no 3, p. 4.
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