Archaeology in Hastings County

Roughly 10,000-12,000 years ago, hard on the heels of the rapidly retreating glaciers and receding proglacial lakes that marked the end of the Wisconsinan ice age, people first arrived in the region we have since come to know as the county of Hastings. These pioneers, the distant ancestors of today's First Nation peoples, were hunter-gatherers who spent large parts of their year following migrating herds of caribou.

Unfortunately, we don't know much more about the archaeology of Hastings County prior to European Contact other than what can be inferred from our knowledge of Ontario prehistory in general. The county has never been the subject of sustained, detailed archaeological research, especially in the north. There are only 72 known sites in all of Hastings.

Over the course of the last 150 years, archaeological research in Hastings County has been sporadic, at best. However, what has been reported has generally been work of high quality. In the late 1850s and '60s, for example, Thomas Wallbridge travelled about Prince Edward and Hastings counties in search of pre-Contact aboriginal burial mounds. Despite occasional forays into the county by provincial archaeologists, Hastings archaeology, after Wallbridge, seems to have been dominated by the almost totally unreported activities of a number of local collectors until well into the 1960s and '70s.

Among the more notable of these avocational practitioners was George Chadd, of Carrying Place, whose vast collections from a number of sites located across Hastings and Prince Edward counties were acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum in the 1930s. Equally notable was the Reverend Bowen P. Squire, whose archaeological activities of the 1950s resulted in his identification of the significant presence in the county of people associated with the Laurentian Archaic culture, which lasted from circa 7,000 to perhaps as late as 3,000 years ago.