Sifting through the sands of time

If you stand really still and listen to the wind, you may still hear the sounds of the First Nations people that once walked the rolling hills of our land.
If you need more concrete evidence of their existance, one needed to witness the excavation that just wrapped up in the hills on SE23-3-26-W2nd, northeast of Coronach, near the Poplar River Mine.
Butch Amundson, Senior Archaeologists, for Stantec Consulting was the lead man for the achaelogical dig that his company is performing for Sherritt Coal on land that is proposed for mining.
The initial study was completed earlier when the area was walked to identify sites of interest.
The current archaelogical study is being done ahead of a dragline power line that is being installed in preparation for mining in the future.
The six person crew identified 85 tipi rings in two stone circle sites; 48 on the north ridge and 37 on the south ridge of a valley that they also identified as a bison drive lane.
Local hunters have walked those hills for years but most would not have noticed the piles of stones that once held branches adorned with fabric that the First Nations people used to fool the buffalo into thinking that there was a large line of people along the ridge, keeping the buffalo contained in the valley until they were ready to drive them to a kill site. But, that is Amundson's job and the line of stone cairns was quite obvious to him.
Out of the 85 identified tipi rings, the archaelogical crew excavated five. In the excavation, the area is laid out into a one metre grid.
Every stone and stone circle is mapped.Then the ground is dug up, one metre at a time, one 50 cm square piece at a time. The soil from this square is put in pails and then into a screened box where it is sifted out to identify artifacts.
Amundson reported that they have found hundreds of artifacts in each tipi ring. Items such as arrow heads, pottery and a seed bead. The most common finds are waste flakes from stones that are the product of making stone tools and rocks that have been broken by the heat of a campfire.
Among the finds was a trade item, a seed bead, which is a small glass bead that was made in Europe. The discovery of this type of item indicates that these people lived in the area more recently, likely as recent as 300 years old, when the natives traded with people either from Europe or from those who traded with Europeans. Some of the oldest items date back over 2000 years ago.
Items are bagged seperately from each 50 cm square and took back to the Stantec lab. Each item that is found is catalogued showing its exact location and then the items are mapped and sent to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina.
Because of the location of the rings, with no shelter and evidence of the campfire inside, Amundson predicted that the people lived in the area during spring or fall. With the absence of water, Amundson also predicted that the people stayed for only a short time. He says it they can only determine the age of the tipi rings within an eighty year range, so it is impossible to predict how many people lived in the area at one time.