Archeologist are hoping that, with recent finds of bones and tools in the McKinnon Flats area, they will be able to piece together a better picture of the region’s indigenous history.
“This is just such an enormously rich archeological area,” said Wendy Unfreed, Regional Archeologist with the Archaeological Survey of Alberta.
Archeologist from Lifeways of Canada, a firm hired by the Alberta government to excavate the McKinnon Flats site, located South of Langdon, were carefully digging and to sifting in two pits Oct. 7.
“They’re going down quite deep,” said Unfreed of the two excavations.
The first, located below a cliff, is thought to be related to a bison kill site.
Unfreed said that the actual kill site was likely closer to the cliff face.
“It’s sitting under so much fallen rock and re-vegetated area that we can’t actually get to the kill site proper,” said Unfreed.
The site they are excavating represents the spill that has come down the slope from the kill site.
“There are a lot of bison bones which are fairly intact,” she said.
The bones found at this site haven’t been broken much which Unfreed said means the bison weren’t processed at this first site.
“The rough butchering is being done here,” she said.
The archeologist believe that the processing occurred at their other dig site.
They have found evidence of fires likely used to boil water to extract bone marrow and to dry the meat.
From what they have discovered they believe that the McKinnon Flats are was a favoured area for the Bison and because of that it was important to the native people.
“Where the bison go the people go,” said Unfreed.
The McKinnon Flats site was discovered after the 2013 Southern Alberta Floods.
Damage and erosion to the riverbanks caused by the flooding revealed 100 new archeological sites, including the one at McKinnon Flats.
The floods also helped to uncover new finds at 87 existing sites.
These sites were identified as part of an Alberta Culture and Tourism’s three-year-program that saw both archaeologists and paleontologists exploring nearly 500 kilometres of riverbanks along the Bow, Sheep, Kananaskis and Highwood rivers that were affected by the flood.
“It created a lot of devastation in terms of the archeological deposits because the archeological deposits are embedded in the river banks her,” said Unfreed.
She said they believe that 10 metres of the bank was washed away by the flood.
The goal of the program has been to identify, protect and preserve Alberta’s history.
“In this particular case there was about 400 metres of exposure that got opened up that we saw some bones and rocks from a boiling pit,” she said.
The government is wrapping up work on this project with the work at the McKinnon Flats site scheduled to be completed by the end of October before the ground freezes.
Once work at the site is completed, the in depth analysis by Lifeways, including radio carbon dating of the findings can start.
“They will be putting together the story for us,” said Unfreed.
Her job will then be to take the report from Lifeways along with the reports from others site across the region and piece together the larger story of Alberta’s history.
