By Graham Cook

Topics researched included the history of the Tla’amin hunting dogs, where people moved after the great fire of 1918, and how and where people lived

An Archaeology field school featuring graduate students from SFU and universities from across Western Canada worked on excavating an ancient village on the Sunshine Coast with the goal of creating an atlas of the region and Tla’amin history.

Members of the Tla’amin First Nation, University of Saskatchewan professor Keith Carlson, and SFU archaeologist Dana Lepofsky led the group.

“There were basically six instructors and five students, so it was an amazing ratio,” Lepofsky told The Peak. “They had a week of classes at the beginning that combined archaeology and history . . . so really the whole point of the field school is to combine these different kinds of knowledge.”

She further stated that these first-week lectures occurred at the reserves where they were living, and that in the second and third weeks the students began choosing topics that the Tla’amin First Nations said they wanted to know about.
Lepofsky explained that these historical topics included “the history of their hunting dogs, the history of where people moved after the great fire of 1918, or how and where people lived.”

During the research of their chosen topics, students spoke with community mentors and those living in the area in order to put together plates that will be in the historical atlas. Lepofsky stated that that they will have, for example, “plates on houses thousands of years ago to the present. . . . There’s a whole series of plates that we have planned.” When the students were not conducting these interviews on the reserve, they were spending a week at a time excavating a 2,400-year-old village.

A number of the students involved, Lepofsky said, “were history students who had never done archaeology before but they were being led by SFU PhD student Chris Springer and were loving it. . . . These are people who love history but have only worked with text.” Lepofsky explained that they plan involve raising the capital necessary to create the atlas.

SFU has been working with Tla’amin First Nations for about five years in archaeology and heritage projects. Lepofsky said that they hope to continue and expand this work and that they believe “that every archaeology, [native studies, and history] student in Western Canada should take this class, because it’s really a blending of different kinds of knowledge.”