by Christopher Cramer, Red Creek, New York
Volume 72, Number 1, January 2025 Central States Archaeological Journal
The dams associated with the St. Lawrence Seaway project flooded several islands and adjacent shorelines during the late 1950s. Sheek Island and its Ault Park recreation area, located eight miles west of Cornwall, Ontario, were among the flooded lands. Known by its acronym APSI, Ault Park on Sheek Island was the site of a two-year archeological excavation conducted by University of Toronto and National Museum of Canada in 1956-58, just before the flooding. Many Indian artifacts were uncovered before the island and neighboring lands were inundated by up to 14 feet of water. Archeologists classified the APSI site as multi-component: “Middle Archaic, Laurentian, Archaic, Meadowood, Point Peninsula, Pickering, St. Lawrence Iroquois.”
Fast forward to Spring of 2023 when I was contacted by a local man who told me he had inherited a number of “arrowheads” from an old friend who had inherited them from an old friend; the precise chain of custody remains unknown. Knowing I was an enthusiastic collector of artifacts, the owner invited me to acquire the modest collection which was packed away in plastic totes in a storage locker.
Many artifacts were labeled “A.P.S.I.” and some were labeled “Ault Park Sheek Island.” A quick internet search led me to the history of the 1956-58 excavation of this island in the St. Lawrence River.
The totes contained a few dozen flint projectile points and blades of various sizes and conditions (mostly field grade), a few hard stone tools, 100 small clay pottery sherds, and ephemera associated with the archeological project. The most outstanding artifact, which I have happily added to my collection, is a rare 3 ¼” double-notched Meadowood blade made of Onondaga chert in fine condition. (Fig. 1)
Also found in this collection were a few dozen stone artifacts labeled “BiGa6.” Some internet sleuthing about these mysterious labels introduced me to Canada’s Borden System, which is a nationwide numbering system used to organize archeological sites and the artifacts found there. Based on a grid of closely spaced longitude and latitude lines, the Borden System uses four letters to locate a specific 16 km by 16 km plot which is the subject of an archeological investigation. These letters are followed by a number that represents a particular dig site within that plot, and may then be followed by a dashed number assigned to each specific artifact found there. So, for example, the label “BiGa6 – 215” represents the 215th artifact found at the 6th dig site within Borden plot BiGa. (Fig. 2) Research reveals that Borden plot BiGa is located at Constance Bay in the Ottawa River, just west of Ottawa, Ontario. So, one simple label on the beautiful three-inch brown jasper blade shown in Figure 2 tells us that it was artifact 215, found at the sixth archeological site, at Constance Bay, Ontario. Other labeling of artifacts indicates this site was excavated in 1959.
More internet research led me to a site report, now archived at the Canadian Museum of History, regarding the 1956-58 excavations at Ault Park on Sheek Island. My respectful request for a copy of that report was denied by a museum curator. He wrote back about my newly acquired artifacts: a collection of artifacts that I rescued from storage locker oblivion. “I’m available,” he wrote, “to assist in facilitating their return to the appropriate entities such as the government, Indigenous communities, or others.”
The artifacts currently reside in display cases on my living room bookshelves.
Figure 1. Both faces of a double-notched Meadowood blade. It measures 3 ¼” in length and is made from Onondaga chert.
Figure 2. Artifact 215. Found at Constance Bay, Ontario, Canada. It measures 3 ½” in length and is made from brown jasper.