CGRG Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology
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Author : Driver, J.C.
Date : 2001.
Title : Preglacial archaeological evidence at Grimshaw, the Peace River area, Alberta: Discussion.
Publication : Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences
Issue : 38(5):
Page(s) : 871-874.
Abstract
The question of when people first entered the Americas has plagued archaeologists for more than a century, and the origin of the indigenous inhabitants of the western hemi-sphere has attracted scholarly speculation for more than four hundred years (Fiedel 2000). Discussions about the time of the first human migration largely revolve around two issues. First, there has been much debate about whether certain fractured rocks and animal bones are the product of human behaviour. Secondly, there have been numerous controver-sies about sites that appear to contain artifacts, but whose dating is in question. This paper concerns the first problem. Chlachula and Leslie (1998) claim that fractured quartzite cobbles from the base of a Wisconsinan Laurentide till in the Peace River area of Alberta provide evidence for human presence in Canada prior to the last glaciation. If this is correct, the Grimshaw locality, together with two localities outside Calgary (Chlachula 1994a, 1994b, 1996; Chlachula and Le Blanc 1996) provide the first evidence for preglacial humans in any area of Canada that was subsequently covered by ice. While the stratigraphic position of the objects in the Grimshaw locality is not questioned, it remains to be dem-onstrated that the fractured cobbles are definitely of human manufacture. In this paper, the nature of the supposed artifacts is reviewed. It is concluded that Chlachula and Leslie have not demonstrated the artifactual nature of the specimens, and therefore the site cannot be considered to demonstrate the presence of humans prior to the Late Wisconsinan in Alberta.
Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology