Digging Up Identities

University of Windsor graduate History student, Zack Hamm, discusses why the study of Ontario archaeology is pertinent to understanding the characteristics of modern professions, the industry of culture in Canada, as well as the development of Canadian archaeology into the twentieth century. Click here to read more about Zack Hamm.

Digging Up Identities: A modern transition to professional archaeology in Ontario

by Zack Hamm 
 

Very few comprehensive and focused efforts have been made to study the history of archaeology in Ontario. In order to contribute to the sparse field of this history, I am looking into the development of archaeology in Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its relationship with the modern project, modern identities, and the ethos of imperial cultural hegemony.

For my research, this involves examining the origins of the practice of archaeology in Ontario, key individuals or ‘founders’ of Ontario archaeology, and the institutions that normalized archaeological projects and discourse. The ‘historical arc’ of Ontario archaeology was briefly surveyed by Rob Macdonald at the 2013 40th Annual Symposium of the Ontario Archaeological Society, wherein he rounded up a tidy summary of individuals and institutions in Ontario archaeology’s history in his Envisioning the Next Phase of Ontario Archaeology talk. Instead of surveying for the purpose of grounding ‘the next phase’, my research aims to expand our ideas of the history of modernity in Ontario and Canada through the science of archaeology as a case study. By looking at individuals, institutions, and groups involved with the development of archaeology, trends emerge, and those trends themselves might become subject to analysis; for example, early archaeologists in Ontario were pretty much middle-class without exception. That flies in the face of the normal trope of the Victorian gentleman-scholar who often didn’t rely on his adventures in archaeology as a livelihood.

Ontario’s first professional archaeologist, David Boyle (pictured right), began as a blacksmith, then became a schoolteacher, and then finally settled into archaeology and academics. In one way, Boyle was a product of modernity in that he was an upwardly mobile self-taught individual, but also in that his capacity for networking was unmatched and his list of connections was gargantuan. Though formally uneducated, he was self-made and only entered what you would strictly define as academia later in his life after he had broken out of the tradesman’s mould set for him by generations of blacksmiths in his native Scotland.

In many ways, practices and traditions from the U.K. followed its immigrants across the Atlantic; an important one for my research is the practice of ‘curio’ collecting - where modern museums find their origins. Michelle Hamilton recently detailed the complicated interplay between Native and non-Native collectors and contributors to these collections in her 2010 publication Collections and Objections. Eventually, categorical organization practices would turn these collections into museums; there’s an important correlation between the rise of modern science, categorization, museums, and the development of archaeology as a profession. In Ontario as in other places, the same people had their hands in all of it, and alongside the development of archaeology sat the colonization of identity in Native cultures perceived by intellectual culture at the time, as Hamilton says, to be on the brink of extinction.

Sir Daniel Wilson, another Scottish-Canadian several decades before Boyle, introduced the term ‘prehistory’ and the Three Ages System to the English language in the United Kingdom before giving up on European archaeological anthropology and taking a full-time professorship for English at the University of Toronto; in his spare time he proceeded to study what he considered to be a quickly receding culture of living prehistory – the Native peoples of Northern Ontario, with whom he formed courteous and often warm relationships. This relationship with Native leadership carried on in terms of individuals’ relationships in Canadian archaeology, and many famous Ontario archaeologists also corresponded and worked with enthusiastic Native contacts. I would like to explore more thoroughly the dynamics between the professionalizing archaeological community and the Native communities who were interested in the practice of archaeology.

Canada is often treated as a peripheral colonial stage in the theatre of modernism and the Victorian era. By looking into characteristically modern professions such as archaeology and its industry of culture, and their development into the twentieth century, we can both build a more comprehensive picture of Ontario’s past and get a better sense of what makes Canadian history unique.
 

For more about the history of archaeology in Ontario read Nelle Oosterom's review of Before Ontario: The Archaeology of a Province by Marit K. Munson and Susan M. Jamieson

If you want to share your research on CanadasHistory.ca please email Jessica Knapp, Canada's History's Online Engagement Coordinator.

Zack earned his Bachelor's of Arts degree studying Classics and Political Science at the University of Windsor, he focused on archaeology, classical literature, and international economy. Zack is a part-time archaeologist; he has excavated in Greece, participated in experimental Bronze Age beer manufacturing on Cyprus, and worked in Cultural Resource Management during excavations in Ontario, Canada. He has an interest in the history of identities within the profession of archaeology, as well as maritime and nautical archaeological excavation. In his spare time Zack scuba dives and brews homemade mead.