The Holy Grail Of New World Archeology

How a dedicated West Coast team unearthed the oldest archeological sites in Canada.

- Tom Koppel

IT’S APRIL 2016 and the tide is out at a sheltered bay on remote and ruggedly beautiful Calvert Island, on British Columbia’s central coast, where the only year-round residents are wolves. A sprawling dig is centred on a shallow two-metre by four-metre pit precisely carved into the beach. Black hoses snake along the mudflat from a distant pump, bringing sea water to tripods holding wooden-framed metal screens. Rubber-booted archeologists and their assistants haul pails of material excavated from the pit to fill the frames. Others wash, pick through and inspect the diggings for items of interest, which go into labelled plastic bags. Someone warns me not to leave my brown-bag lunch uncovered. High on a branch, a huge raven eyes us, ready to swoop down. There’s excitement when a screener finds a stone flake from ancient tool-making. But the most poignant evidence of very early human activity here is a series of remarkable footprints.

“Footprints have raised ridges,” says Duncan McLaren, an assistant professor in the University of Victoria’s department of anthropology, as he crouches in the pit, scraping with his trowel. “Here, you see what we think is the back — the heel — of a footprint, and here is another entire footprint, with toes.” When someone steps into soft sand or mud and then pulls their foot out, it raises the area around the edges and leaves a slight depression. “This black sediment is set into it,” he adds, pointing to where dark sand later filled in the depressed area. The contrast makes the prints readily visible. “You can almost feel the edge of the footprint with the trowel, and the clay has a slightly anaerobic scent from lack of oxygen. Like rotten eggs.”