Museum of Ontario Archeology
The Museum of Ontario Archeology is a museum in the Canadian province of Ontario , more precisely at 1600 Attawandaron Road, London . It covers the 11,000-year history of the southwest of the province and has participated in numerous archaeological excavation campaigns.
It is located next to the excavation site of a village from the 16th century, consisting of at least 19 long houses, which was inhabited by the neutrals , an Iroquois group whose self-name has not been passed down. The site was listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places in 2004 . In July 2007, the reconstruction of a nave and palisades began, as they were characteristic of the era. There is also an interpretive center , in which teaching materials are on display, but also themed exhibitions and presentations of current excavation finds are presented.
The museum, which houses more than two million artefacts , has published the so-called Educator Update every quarter since 2009 and the newsletter The Palisade E-Post since December 2008 . Museum of Ontario Archeology .
history
The museum goes back to the initiative of Wilfrid Jury (1890–1981), who together with his father Amos Jury (1861–1964) collected artifacts and cataloged them in a small booklet. In 1923 the collection consisted of 45 objects. They mostly bought the artifacts from farmers whom they had pulled up with their plows.
The juries came into contact with the University of Western Ontario in 1927 when they were invited to display their collection in the university library. There were Sherwood Fox, the president of the university, Fred Landon, the responsible librarian, Arthur Ford, editor of the London Free Press and chair of the University Board of Governors, and Ray Lawson , an entrepreneur who owned the Lawson Indian village site and who later went on to do so Lieutenant Governor (Lieutenant Governor) of Ontario became.
In 1933, Lawson requested the construction of a museum when planning the Lawson Memorial Library. This resulted in The Museum of Indian Archeology and Pioneer Life , whose honorary curator Amos jury and whose curator Wilfrid jury became. The museum was in the Lawson Library from 1934 to 1960. Wilfrid Jury was not paid a fee until 1945, initially with $ 2,000 a year. This made him one of the few paid archaeologists in Canada.
Wilfrid Jury undertook several, albeit small, excavations between 1933 and 1944. The bulletin in which the jury published its results was published at the end of the 1930s . After World War II, he focused on Huronia , where he studied Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons , a Jesuit mission that existed from 1639 to 1649, but also the prehistoric Huron Forget village site . In 1954 he had a village reconstructed for the first time in the province, the Indian village in Midland . At the same time, he was the first to conduct archeology field schools, i.e. excavations in which teaching had priority, where mainly students, but also volunteers, were trained.
In 1960 the museum was moved from the library to Middlesex College. In 1969 he was able to persuade Tom Lawson, Ray Lawson's son, to bequeath his Indian village, the Lawson site, to the house. Elizabeth Klinger and Martha Hamilton of the Fuller family also donated land adjacent to the site.
In 1973 a committee was formed to respond to a request from the University of Western Ontario Alumni Association to use the Lawson site and find a location for the jury collection. This task has been entrusted to David Chambers, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and William D. Finlayson, lecturer in the newly established Department of Anthropology . Finlayson became a director on July 1, 1976 after receiving his doctorate. He envisioned a university, archaeological institution with excavation programs, a reconstruction and a museum building. Since 1978 the museum has been officially called The Museum of Indian Archeology (London) . Funding was facilitated by a grant from the Richard and Jean Ivey Fund . On March 31, 1978, an exhibition gallery was opened in Somerville House on the university campus. Additional space was added in the basement of Middlesex College .
The museum staff taught in the Department of Anthropology , but also ran a journalism program for Native People at the School of Journalism and programs in the Faculty of Part-Time and Continuing Education at the University of Western Ontario through. Anthropology courses were also held at Erindale College, at the University of Toronto .
In late 1978, plans were made for a 15,000- square- foot museum and a campaign was launched to bring in $ 1.5 million. In the fall of 1980, the Lawson Jury Building could begin. Dr. Wilfrid Jury broke ground at the age of 90. The local architect Wilfrid B. Lamb designed a building that was sunk deep into the ground and given the look of an Iroquois village.
The 11,000 Year History of Occupation of Southwestern Ontario was created as a permanent exhibition . Back to Our Future was added in 1987 , an exhibition about the excavations the museum was doing at the Keffer Site near Toronto . Later, the area around Crawford Lake and in the City of London was added, on a large scale at Toronto International Airport, where the Draper (1974 to 1979) and the White site were excavated, as well as a site on Christian Island Indian Reserve in Georgian Bay . The Draper dig site is a 3.5 hectare Huron village that was excavated in 1975 and 1978. The work showed that the village had started with 450 inhabitants and later grew to around 2000 inhabitants. At the airport, it was an area of 5.28 hectares in which seven known sites were located. 125 new ones emerged during the excavation.
The archaeological investigation of the Lawson site found a camp that proved that the area had been sporadically inhabited for 4000 years (Spook Hallow). Lawson Village was on a hill at the confluence of Medway Creek and Snake Creek and is around 500 years old. It was 2 hectares in size and suitable for around 2000 residents. The earthworks that once supported the palisades have been partially preserved, which is a rarity in this region. The northern quarter of the excavation area was used for agriculture until 1975. The Lawson family bought the remaining three quarters before 1920. In the summers of 1921, 1922 and 1923, the first scientific excavations were carried out under the direction of William J. Wintemberg from the Victoria Museum in Ottawa , now the Canadian Museum of Civilization . In 1976, William D. Finlayson ran a first modern campaign. From 1978, the museum archaeologist Robert J. Pearce led the research, focusing from 1978 to 1981 on the northern, plowed area. The village has numerous summer houses, which are spread around the area, and which are also the target of excavations. These single houses were inhabited by women, children and a few men. Beans, pumpkins, corn and tobacco were harvested here, fish was dried and tools were made, which migrated to the main village with the residents in autumn. This type of settlement seems to have only been common among the neutrals.
Since 1977 the museum has worked on 400 projects, exploring and excavating 8,552 hectares, discovering 830 sites, of which 103 have been excavated. Several sites belonged to the Archaic period , so they were 3,000 to 10,000 years old. Three undisturbed sites belonged to the Middle Woodland period (300 BC to 500 AD).
The house also deals with early European settlement.
literature
- William D. Finlayson (Ed.): London, Ontario, The First 11000 Years , London, Ontario: London Museum of Archeology 1990.
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ This and the following, according to the museum's website.
Coordinates: 43 ° 0 ′ 48.5 " N , 81 ° 18 ′ 20.2" W.