Dig at Forks uncovers 800-year-old footprint

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/07/2008 (6298 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Someone — it remains unclear whether it was a man or a woman — once walked away from a campsite at The Forks and stepped on a piece of pottery.

About 800 years later, that person walked into history.

A footprint that person left behind — and the pottery shard he or she allegedly trampled — were uncovered by an excavator working at an archeological dig on the future site of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

“That’s one of the reasons I like this kind of work,” Ernie Reichert said Monday, a day after his discovery.

“Every day is an exposure to something new,” he said.

It was only the second case of human footprints found by archeologists at the historic meeting place.

In fact, the footprint could be only the second of its kind found in clay-based soil anywhere in North America, said Sid Kroeker, who has worked on digs at The Forks for 20 years.

Unlike volcanic rock, which can hold the shape of a footprint forever, clay is a “plastic material,” Kroeker said.

While The Forks has about 6,000 years of artifacts buried in its soil, human markings of any sort are rare.

“Things like that, all of a sudden, make it personal,” Kroeker said of the footprint’s significance. “All of a sudden there’s somebody you can relate to.”

Since June, Kroeker’s company, Quaternary Consultants Ltd., has explored a 200-square-metre area near the north end of The Forks that will be the basement of the proposed museum.

The team of about a dozen people expects to find between 200,000 and 300,000 artifacts, from fish bones to ancient tools, on the site by the time it completes the dig in September.

The findings of recent days, however, got Kroeker excited.

In addition to the footprint, the excavators uncovered three palettes on which former Forks inhabitants mixed a reddish substance called hematite with fish oil to make paint for their clothing, bags or teepee walls.

“I had only seen (a palette) in museums and ethnographic collections,” Kroeker said. “We found three here.”

Besides excavating the museum site, a step required by law anytime a developer applies for a heritage permit at a place believed to hold important artifacts, Kroeker’s company will also clean its findings, catalogue them in a computer and produce a report.

Its work under a semicircular tent drew a smattering of onlookers Monday.

Reichert, who used a simple trowel to uncover the footprint, was originally skeptical about what he had found.

He thought the print might actually be the burrowing of a rodent.

But the unusual impression wasn’t shaped like a cylinder as most burrows are. Instead, it had a flat bottom.

The pottery shard found underneath the print was below the level of other similar pieces nearby.

Reichert continued to pick away at the small area, about three-quarters of a metre into the ground, and then he and some colleagues made a plaster cast of the print.

A heel emerged, and an instep and toes.

It was a left foot, about a size nine, making it difficult to say if the print belonged to a man or a woman.

“They had a nicely androgynous foot size,” Reichert said.

joe.paraskevas@freepress.mb.ca