Raiders of the Lost Floor

Fort Mississauga, located smack-dab in the middle of North America's oldest golf course.
I guess you could say it was there beFORE. *crickets*

Last summer, I was incredibly lucky to get a chance to swap my shako, bayonet and musket for a fedora, whip and revolver in my archaeological quest to seek the Forgotten Floor of Fort Mississauga!

Fort Mississauga was started in 1814, after Fort George had been all but completely destroyed by the Americans. The British realized that rebuilding it might lead to the same fate befalling it a second time, so they got smart and decided to fortify the mouth of the Niagara River. This would eventually become Fort Mississauga. The stone structure you see above is the only remaining building, used as a barracks in the fifty years between the War of 1812's conclusion and the British leaving in the 1870s.

As you can imagine, maintaining that kind of historical structure is no easy feat. In order to assess the stability of the building, Parks Canada first needed to ensure that no construction would destroy any of the original interior.

This is where I swung in to save the day.*

Working with official Parks Canada archaeologists, we needed to dig through the brick floor that had been laid down in the 1970s to see what was underneath. After breaking through the dirt and dust, we made some pretty awesome discoveries.

The second test-pit, which shows what is
believed to be an original wall

We had two test-pits to dig in two separate rooms. Mine and my co-worker Anne's started fairly uneventful (no snakes or Nazis lurking about) while the second test-pit almost immediately got results (see pic): one of the walls from the original powder magazine (there would have been some kind of door, hence the wall's short length).

Now I was determined to find something interesting before I left that day.

After several more hours of digging and sifting (which meant lugging two full buckets of dirt up and down two flights of stairs -- funny, they never show Indiana Jones doing that), we started to make some progress.

Our first find was a small group of nails, used presumably in the original floorboards. Neat, but not groundbreaking (no pun intended).

However, soon after we struck gold (sadly, not literally): a piece of canister shot, used in cannons (think a metal tin full of golf-ball sized projectiles). That seems to support the theory that the building's basement was used as a munitions and powder store.

A piece of canister shot

A piece of china

Our final big find of the day was especially neat to us at Fort George. We dug up a piece of china from some kind of plate or bowl. Of particular interest was the colour around its edge: green tint. This matched the design and colour of original china found at Fort George back in a 1970s archaeological dig. Obviously they weren't from the same set, but the green colour seems to indicate that the pattern was quite popular with the officers that could afford them.

All in all, not a bad day for my first foray into the world of Dr. Jones. It's days like this that make my job extra special -- it's one thing to talk about history all day long, but getting a chance to actually dig it up is amazing.

-J-