With yard sale season right around the corner, you may be contemplating the odds and ends you have around your home. That shard of metal you found on a river bank. The rock collection you had when you were a kid. Your grandmother’s china set, collecting dust in the crawlspace. Is it junk that you’d be better off without? Or is it a profound connection to the past?
So before you give away Grandma’s beloved teapot away for $0.25 on the first real warm day, consider stopping by the Whitehorse Public Library on the afternoon of April 12, where Yukon Heritage Resources will be hosting an artifact identification event. Bottles, Bones and Birch Bark Baskets is free, and will have a team of local experts to help suss out the significance of your detritus.
There will also be a representative exhibit of artifacts and ancient specimens for people to check out.
There will be a team of archaeologists and paleontologists on deck, equipped with catalogues of historic artifacts to help people identify the age and nature of the items they are bringing in.
The team are usually able to identify what the object is and how it relates to Yukon history, said Christian Thomas, an archaeologist with Yukon’s heritage department. Questions of a scientific nature, like how old a fossil is, can be a bit more difficult to answer exactly without doing scientific sampling, he said. However, they can often provide information based on knowing more about the landscape where a given object was found.
“The context really is important for understanding what it is you're dealing with. Some of the information that people are interested is stored in the artifact. Some of it is stored in the landscape,” said Thomas.
While some objects leave the event with their owners, some are actually donated to YG’s collections due to their significance, said Thomas. Those who brought in the objects are kept in the loop throughout the process.
“Some of our most interesting research projects have started with members of the public encountering something unusual out on the landscape that they didn't really recognize the significance but after showing it to some of the resources and cultural services branch,” said Thomas. “These kind of chance finds that people have made have actually turned into, you know, multi-decade research projects.”
Thomas recalls a pair of hunters bringing in a wooden shaft they found near Kusawa Lake.
“After some examination, it was determined to be a 4,000-year-old spear shaft that had melted out of some ice, and that's spawned into a research project that's been going on for 27 years,” said Thomas.
Now, Thomas said, a monitoring program by Yukon First Nations has found all sorts of ancient hunting weapons melting out of ice on the mountains, thanks to the two hunters who reached out because they had found something unusual.
Thomas said events like the one happening at the library on April 12 are important, because the Yukon government doesn’t currently have an open interpretative space for archeological objects. Thomas said he hopes people feel comfortable to come to the event and talk about the objects they have found with staff.
“Yukon’s heritage is important. The Yukon needs a territorial story, and that story is told through our history, and also our historic sites, all the places where Yukon history has occurred.”
Thomas said if you encounter a heritage site or you think you have made a find, to consult the Yukon’s Living Heritage website. If you’re out on the land and you think something has heritage value, leave it where it is, take a photo, measurements, and notes to share with the Yukon Heritage Resources branch.
Contact Talar stockton at talar.stockton@yukon-news.com
