Dodging dog walkers and dirt piles, students are digging up Edworthy Park’s soiled-over past. 

Since May 15, future archaeologists from the University of Calgary (UCalgary) have been excavating sites at the north end of Edworthy Park in partnership with Calgary Parks and Open Spaces. 

This is the second rendition of the local field school, which successfully uncovered artifacts at Nose Hill Park last summer. Cultural landscape planner with the city, Laureen Bryant, said the project intends to preserve the history of the parks.

“These sites are underground, so they are threatened by development,” she said.

Bryant said that many Calgarians are unaware of the rich stories living beneath the city’s soil, and that doing this in a public space offers passing people an opportunity to learn about the land.

“Partnering with the university on programs like this provides that unique experiential opportunity for those folks doing the public program,” she said. 

“But also the incidental education that you get from all of the park’s visitors wandering by and stopping to have a chat.”

Being an archaeologist by trade, Bryant worked with Lindsay Amundsen-Meyer for approximately 15 years, who currently teaches the discipline as an assistant professor at UCalgary. Until June 4, Amundsen-Meyer will be instructing the field school by instilling basic excavation skills into students.

“I want them to be able to shovel, shave, and know how to map artifacts,” she said.

“So that when they show up on a job in the industry, they can jump right in.”

Amundsen-Meyer said that there is a labour shortage in the archaeological job market and that many of her students enter full-time employment positions soon after earning their degree. 

“If we can train them better here, they’re better prepared,” said Amundsen-Meyer.

Since the Edworthy Park excavations began, she said that they have found a bone, but that this will not be able to offer a timeline as to how old the site is until carbon dating results are available sometime in the winter.

Additionally, Amundsen-Meyer said they have found a series of “lithics,” which are sandstones primarily composed of quartz that were used as weapons and tools by early peoples, according to an article in SpringerLink.  

Some of the stones are believed to have been used to butcher animal carcasses, and Amundsen-Meyer said that the diversity of the fragments leads her to believe that the area was once a campsite of sorts. 

Despite not knowing the exact date of the site, she said that Alberta has a known history going back 13,000 years. In that, Amundsen-Meyer said that since the Edworthy Park site was first recorded in 1977, it’s known that it was once a homestead in the 1880s and later a brick-making plant. 

However, she said it likely housed an Indigenous community before European contact.

Unearthing the past to rebuild Indigenous trust

Taren Crowchief is an archaeological research assistant working under Amundsen-Meyer. He is from the Treaty 7 Siksika Nation, and said that apart from his “really big love” for exploring digs, participating in the field school has changed his perspective on the land in Calgary.

“I’ve grown up here, and just knowing that my roots come directly from the past…it’s really intriguing and cool,” he said.

Crowchief said that the discoveries from the field school are not important to just the people doing the digging, but for all residents who call where the Bow and Elbow Rivers intersect home. 

“It really helps us to bring it to light,” he said. 

“So that other people have an understanding and just get a good idea of our history.”

Amundsen-Meyer said that much of her early education involved communicating with Elders upon starting projects, but that her career has taught her that aside from the labour force, there is a shortage of archaeologists struggling to adapt a decolonized mindset. 

“In my opinion, we shouldn’t be doing archaeology without connecting to those descendant communities,” said Amundsen-Meyer.

As a result, she has made including the voices of local Indigenous peoples an important step in the field school’s operations. Kicking off the Edworthy Park dig, Amundsen-Meyer said that Elder Kent Ayoungman, from the Siksika Nation, led archaeologists in a ceremony. 

“That’s before we ever stuck a shovel in the ground,” she said.

“I was taught that that’s the right thing to do.”