Team finds 12,000 year old campsite in Canada

A site uncovered during the construction of a highway bypass in New Brunswick, Canada has yielded hundreds of objects that are believed to be about 12,000 years old, according to Global News.

Discovered by an archaeologist nearly two years ago near the province’s capital, Fredericton, archaeologists have just recently been able to spend three weeks excavating the site, which appears to date from an extremely rare time period—meaning it stands to fill in some gaps in local history.

“This gives us our only glimpse into what people were doing during this time period,” explained New Brunswick’s Provincial Archaeologist Brent Suttie to CTV News Atlantic.

“From other areas in the province, we know that by about 13,000 years ago people are living here,” he added. “We have a few sites down in the Penfield area and then we have very famous sites like Debert in Nova Scotia that date to 11,600 years old. We don’t have anything in between those sites.”

Campsite might have been an ancient “beachside resort”

In fact, the excavation team so far has discovered that the campsite—currently surrounded by roads and trees—was once on the beach of an enormous lake.

“There’s actually two concentrations at either end of the site,” said Suttie. “This is actually on a beach overlooking what used to be a glacial lake and so this lake was basically like Grand Lake but much, much larger.”

“The entire town of Fredericton was underwater at the time and this was the shoreline of that lake,” he added.

Besides the discovery of this lake, the team has also uncovered hundreds of ancient stone tools (including projectile points) and flakes (which come off rocks as they are shaped or re-worked), as well as an intact campfire pit with charcoal.

“It’s very, very rare to find a campfire from 12,000 years ago, intact like this,” said Suttie, according to CBC News.

Along with adding a new chapter to the local history textbook, this site offered something unusual in terms of the poignant: Two of the field technicians who worked on the site, Tyson Wood and Shawna Goodall, are Indigenous people.

“To know that they were having a fire in this exact position and my ancestors could be all sitting around this beach shore, having a fire, fishing, camping,” Wood told Global News. “Just to unearth that.”

“Just to hold an artifact in your hand that you know that you’re the first person to hold that in 13,000 years … you get the goosebumps every single time,” said Goodall.

It is certainly not an experience that will be forgotten.

“With the Maliseet people it’s all about oral tradition and talking and telling stories,” Wood explained. “Now that I’m going to be able to bring my own stories back to my community and tell them, that’s just a great feeling.”

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Image credit: Shane Fowler/CBC

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