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| View
to the southwest of a typical ridge top with exposed gravels
containing large quartzite cobble tools in the Caribou
Hills. The Mackenzie River is in the background. |
In the summer and fall of 2002, archaeologists with TeraAGA
(a consortium of Tera Environmental Ltd., AMEC Earth and Environmental
Ltd., Golder Associates Ltd. and Kavik-AXYS Environmental),
conducted a focused reconnaissance of select portions of a
proposed natural gas project, including a pipeline study corridor
from the Mackenzie Delta to the Alberta border. Some potential
granular source and infrastructure locations were also inspected
during the course of investigations. The project area includes
the Niglintgak, Taglu and Parsons Lake gas fields and the
proposed pipeline corridor, which begins at the fields in
the Inuvialuit Settlement Region and passes through portions
of the Gwich’in Settlement Area, the Sahtu Settlement
Area and the Deh Cho Region. All aspects of the fieldwork
were conducted with the help of local assistants. Due to the
scale of the project, encompassing a corridor in excess of
1400 km in length, technicians from eight communities in the
vicinity of the project assisted with the reconnaissance.
There were three distinct components of the field program:
the gas fields, the potential pipeline corridor and potential
granular source and infrastructure locations. No definitive
right-of-way for the pipeline had been determined at the time
of the field program, but a one kilometre wide corridor had
been selected by the Project team to encompass all of the
environmental and heritage studies for 2002. The investigations
of this corridor are currently being used to refine the selection
of the final right-of-way location. The corridor was inspected
by helicopter to confirm areas of high archaeological potential
that had been previously determined on map based studies.
Field crews investigated areas that were deemed to be of high
potential within the corridor. A number of known site locations
were also revisited. Granular source locations included areas
that are potential borrow site locations for materials necessary
for construction. Infrastructure locations included possible
barge landing sites, plant facilities, construction camp locations
and access roads. The granular source and infrastructure locations
were also inspected by air to determine their potential for
heritage resources as well as some field inspections of locales
that exhibited high potential for heritage sites. Surface
and subsurface testing was conducted in both the corridor
and granular / infrastructure investigations.
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| View of a Canol trailer
on a trail adjacent to Bosworth Creek northwest of Norman
Wells. Tree ring analysis of a small coniferous tree indicates
that the trailer was moved to this location prior to 1947. |
The results of the program were positive for yielding archaeological
information. A total of 93 heritage resource sites were investigated
during the course of the program. These include a wide variety
of site types and ages. Sites visited during the course of
the field investigations include 18 precontact period assemblages,
69 historic / contemporary period assemblages and six locales
of palaeontological material. The material from precontact
period sites is primarily comprised of stone flakes and other
debris remaining from stone tool manufacturing. No temporally
diagnostic stone tools were recovered during the field investigations.
Historic period sites primarily relate to traditional land
use practices and include numerous trails, traps, tent and
cabin locations, but sites relating to early communication,
transportation, and oil and gas exploration are also present.
Palaeontological sites were predominantly fossil marine shells,
although one locale of a previously collected mammoth tooth
was also revisited.
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