Ghost Schooners of Lake Ontario: Hamilton and Scourge, and the Night They Rolled Over There is a particular kind of quiet that comes before weather turns on the Great Lakes. Not calm exactly, more like the lake is holding its breath. Ned Myers remembered that stillness on Lake Ontario in early August 1813. In James…

Recent Archaeological Sites in Canada That Are Worth Our Attention When people say “a new discovery,” what they usually mean is that something has become newly documented, newly interpreted, or newly visible. Archaeology is rarely a single dramatic moment. It is fieldwork, survey, careful recording, collaboration with communities, and then the slow work of figuring…

Statues, Context, and the Stories We Pretend Are Neutral We have been raised to believe a presented narrative and to treat statues as if they are history made solid. Bronze somehow equals truth. Stone can equal facts. In this belief lies the first problem. A statue is not a balanced documentary. It is not even…

Giants in the Ground? What archaeology actually finds, what it does not, and why the story matters Every few months the same claim shambles back across social media. A “giant race” once lived here. Their skeletons were found in mounds. Someone swooped in and hid the evidence. Usually the villain is the Smithsonian, a museum,…

Laffite’s Edge at New Orleans As a battlefield archaeologist, I am drawn to the Battle of New Orleans because the Baratarian story sits at the exact point where myth can be tested against material and documentary evidence. Jean Laffite and his circle have been turned into folklore, but the campaign record and the landscape that…

If you’ve ever watched an archaeology documentary, you’d be forgiven for thinking the job is 90% dramatic discoveries and 10% squinting at dusty things while someone whispers, “This changes everything.” Real archaeology is a little less cinematic… and honestly, far more interesting. Because most of what we do isn’t about treasure. It’s about evidence, tiny,…