A soup recipe 2,000 years old

Bluebonnet · Wed Oct 14, 2009 7:41 pm

An archeologist has discovered an intact 2,000-year-old campsite in Rossdale flats, with enough detail to even guess at the recipe the ancient people used in their soup.

The black circle of ash, scattered bison bone fragments and chipped rock doesn't count as a major scientific discovery, said Gareth Spicer, principal archeologist with Calgary-based Turtle Island Cultural Resource Management. But the site has enough diverse elements to tell a story about the lives of a small group of people who camped by the river for several days.

"You don't get that very often," Spicer said. "All the pieces fell together here. It was purely by luck we didn't backhoe out the entire hearth."

The five-day dig happened last May, a provincial requirement before the area around Epcor's decommissioned power plants can be redeveloped.

Spicer submitted his report in early September, recommending the province grant the city the right to develop the land, but to continue to require an archeologist to monitor construction when any further digging occurs.

Those recommendations were accepted last week, and a City of Edmonton-sponsored open house is being scheduled for early November, said city staff. The city is currently considering the spot for a park.

The campsite was found in an open field just across Rossdale Road from Telus Field, about 200 metres northeast of the monument created on a fur-trade era burial ground.

Spicer said based on the evidence found at the site, a small family group likely camped at the spot for a couple of days before moving on. At the time, it was right on the edge of the river, and the pollen record shows it was surrounded by currant shrubs, chokecherry and roses. :clap

He found a broken spear point and more than 150 small sandstone and quartzite fragments, each about the size of a fist, scattered around blackened earth.

The fragments show signs of being heated in a fire, then cracking as they were dumped in cold water--a technique many cultures used to boil water before they had clay pottery or metal pans, says Spicer.

If people were camping in one place for a longer time, they would dig a pit and line it to make a large bowl, then boil water and render the fat from bison bones to make pemmican.

The cracked rocks got discarded when they were too small. Spicer sent several away for testing. Traces of pronghorn, rabbit, whitefish and trout, wild onion and sunflower were found on the rocks, but not in the soil around them, indicating the residue is likely from a soup.

To find the age of the fire, Spicer turned to fragments of several buffalo ribs and a leg bone that were found nearby at the same depth in the soil. He sent them to a lab for radio carbon dating and got dates back of 2010 and 2030 BP, or before present.

Radio carbon dating is always numbered backward from 1950, so the results date the camp to about the time Julius Caesar was invading Britain, the time the Han Dynasty held power in China.

Spicer was contracted by the city to explore the small park for significant historical sites in the wake of long-running disputes over development and unmarked graves in the area.

Two years ago, crowds turned out with lawn chairs to watch him make primary digs. He invited a grave dowser on the advice of an oversight committee member, and spent most of a day marking the elderly man's predictions with wooden stakes and on his GPS.

A grave dowser is similar to the water witchers called on to divine the location of underground streams using sticks or wires, though a grave dowser searches for human remains.

The man pinpointed 78 bodies interred under the grass, and his twisting wire even predicted the ages and genders of the dead, and whether they were native or European.

But when hole by hole no bones turned up, the crowds melted away. Spicer dug 50 of the 78 spots before calling that effort off. But he did find the campsite. The backhoe had scraped just over the ashen circle.

Spicer came back to study the campsite further this May, with the help of students and an elder from the local aboriginal high school, Amiskwaciy Academy.

They excavated 30 square metres and dug to depths of 30 to 50 centimetres, in a flood plain where layers of silt were deposited over thousands of years. What they found offered a small window into lives of people who camped by a river more than 2,000 years ago.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/travel/soup+recipe+years/2094870/story.html#

A soup recipe 2,000 years old

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