Public Authorities And Archeological digs

They sure DO NOT make a big fuss about Archeological digs when a Public Authority such as the Peace Bridge Authority does one. Compare the reaction with the hysteria in Windsor when a private border operator seeks to take action.

• FORT ERIE TIMES
  Archeological dig reveals more ancient artifacts
  
  Jane Davies, Fort Erie Museum Services administrator, displays a flint spearhead at the Mewinzha exhibit located in the PBA administration building.
  
  It's a well-known fact that the land surrounding the Peace Bridge has been an important location for millennia.
  
  Dr. Ron Williamson of Archeological Services Inc. (ASI) has been a part of numerous excavations in Fort Erie over the past 20 years.
  
  Recently, while digging at the Queen Street construction site, Williamson and his team found even more evidence of a prehistoric First Nations culture.
  
  Williamson's team was watching as Town of Fort Erie and Peace Bridge Authority (PBA) workcrews did sidewalk and sewer replacement along the road to the north of the Peace Bridge.
  
  "What we found in those excavations and in working with the construction crews were what we call features - round holes that were dug sometime during the past, most of them probably around 4,000 or 3,000 years ago," Williamson said this week from his Toronto office.
  
  ASI has found literally thousands of these "features" during their more than two decades of archeological work on the Peace Bridge site.
  
  Williamson said these holes were important to the First Nations people who lived here at the time and probably had something to do with fishing or the flint quarries that are located along the river and lakeshore.
  
  The ASI team also found many pieces of ceramic vessels and a large number of projectile points, which were likely used as spearheads for catching fish. Some of the vessels had incised designs on them.
  
  Finding the features and the artifacts in Fort Erie is nothing new for Williamson, who revealed some of his first finds to the Fort Erie Times-Review back in the summer of 1994. Those included arrowheads, scrapers, net weights and grinding tools, as well as a stone hearth.
  
  "It's one of the richest archeological sites in northeastern North America...it's a very large, very rich site. You have to imagine a town below a town," Williamson said.
  
  Many of the artifacts will find their way into the PBA's First Nations archeological display located in the authority's administration building. The exhibit, named Mewinzha, is open to the public and is a collaborative effort between the PBA, the Town, the Native Friendship Centre and Fort Erie Museum Services.
  
  Jane Davies, the museum's head administrator, said the findings are consistent with the recommendations in Fort Erie's archeological master plan.
  
  "These findings are important because they add to our knowledge about Fort Erie's past and more importantly this adds to the world's knowledge about life (in the past)," Davies said, adding it's interesting to draw conclusions about the similarities between local life now and thousands of years ago.
  
  While most of Fort Erie's archeological finds stretch too far back to be able to identify what tribe they come from, Williamson said the artifacts provide a great deal of detail on how Fort Erie's ancient inhabitants lived.
  
  "We're certainly learning about what their economic activities were...who they were interacting with," he said, adding Fort Erie flint has been found in dig sites as far away as northern Ontario.