Windsor's Indigenous community helps Gordie Howe bridge dig crews identify unknown artifacts

There is more to the digging going on in Windsor's Sandwich Town than construction work. A representative from the Gordie Howe bridge project told CBC News that a team of archaeologists is currently surveying the area for artifacts. 

Heather Grondin said the dig is part of the road reconstruction work by the Gordie Howe International Bridge project and the team of archaeologists are working to see what is resting beneath the soil. 

"We are doing some archaeological assessments to ensure that we are protecting, preserving or identifying any pieces of archaeological significance that we may find," said Grondin, who is chief relations officer with the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority.

"It's really important to recognize the history and the culture in any area where construction is taking place and to ensure that we put in place protection should anything be found. 

"There's a lot that we can learn from artifacts that are buried underground and we need to make sure we take that opportunity to assess areas, see if there are any artifacts of significance and anything that may impact our learning going forward," she added.

The work is being done in consultation with the local Indigenous communities. In recent years, several important Indigenous artifacts have been discovered in the area. 

The area is considered a hot spot for archaeology because of its proximity to the river. 

Caldwell First Nation are partners in the project. 

Grondin said the current work is being done in one specific location, but they previously did archaeological assessments throughout the Sandwich Street corridor. 

"Through that process, it was identified that we needed to do one more additional concentrated study right in this area, and that's what's taking place now," she said.

Most artifacts found have been First Nation

Meanwhile, Amanda Black, an archaeologist with Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants, said there have been several excavations in the Sandwich Town area in recent years and most of the artifacts that have been found have been First Nation and early Euro Canadian. 

"At the roundabout, there was a bit of a multi-component site as well, in that we had different time periods of First Nation artifacts being represented there, which just indicates that there's repeated habitation of that particular area over time," Black told CBC News.

Black, who is also president of the Windsor chapter of the Ontario Archaeological Society, said preliminary investigations reveal some of the artifacts date back as far as 10,000 years. 

Noting that "it's not uncommon to have artifacts show up from that time period," Black said.

"Most of [what] we do find are isolated projectile points. Most people call them arrowheads, but a lot of them were actually spearheads and we just use the term projectile point. There have also been different types of pottery found and that would date mostly to the Middle woodland and Western-based time periods," Black said.

Black said items taken out of the ground are taken to a lab where they get washed, catalogued and then sometimes given back to the First Nation communities. She said there are also two facilities in Ontario called Sustainable Archaeology that the artifacts can go into and be researched by other archaeologists.