Ancestry of the land before time: more than crude oil is being uncovered in northern Alberta's vast boreal forests, where people have lived for eleven millennia.

• Author: Chandler, Graham

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Locked up in the sands of northeastern Alberta lie some 175 billion barrels of crude oil--the world's second-largest reserves, after Saudi Arabia. Now producing over a million barrels a day, the area could triple its output in a little over a decade, given the CAN$80 billion of new investment pouring in. It's a massive undertaking that promises to accelerate the already frenzied action in this corner of the oil patch. Highway 63 out of Fort McMurray teems 24/7 with semis, flatbeds, buses, pickup trucks, and vans; gargantuan Caterpillar dump trucks move with purpose over the horizon. All are doing their part to extract a precious resource from these rich sands and cash in on a high-priced global commodity.

Many might think of human activity as a recent phenomenon in this hinterland. But thanks to impact assessments required for the mammoth oil sands projects, archaeologists are discovering that the area has been abuzz for millennia.

Evidence of ancient human habitation is being found at hundreds of sites in these Athabasca lowlands, a region that was almost a complete void in the archaeological record just a few decades ago. It's a huge boon to archaeologists like Brian "Barney" Reeves, who says that "such a discoverable and undisturbed record exists in very few locales in North America." Enough evidence has by now been revealed to define entire new cultural complexes that have made their way into the academic literature.

Like all Canadian provinces, Alberta has a government-regulated system for ensuring the protection of historical resources such as archaeological sites. All projects carry the risk of damaging a historic resource--known or unknown--so individuals or companies undertaking the activity are required to conduct a Heritage Resource Impact Assessment (HRIA) at their own expense before they can obtain a permit. These assessments are normally subcontracted by developers to qualified consulting archaeologists. So the booming oil sands have been paralleled by booming levels of HRIAs--and this has archaeologists and academics delighted.

Prior to recent oil sands activity, precious little funding went into exploring the archaeology of Canada's boreal forests such as these, because it took a relatively large investment to come up with a significant volume of data. Boreal forests are tough environments where archaeological evidence is hard to come by. Thousands of years of deposits are limited to only a few inches of stratification. The acidic soils eat up bones, leather, wood, and other telltale organic residue, offering little to reconstruct ancient ways of life and almost no chance for radiocarbon dating. Stone tools, their manufacturing debris--scraps such as flakes, chips, and broken tools, known as debitage--and fire-broken rock from campfires are mostly all that remain, and these are hard to find.

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Unlike the prairie dwellers who organized communal hunting events such as mass buffalo jumps, leaving troves of artifacts behind, boreal forest hunters generally chased solitary animals in dispersed locations. For archaeologists, this has made finding spear, dart, and arrow points a hit-or-miss affair. Adding to these woes is the sheer difficulty of locating sites amid dense forest, muskeg bogs, and summer mosquitoes.

The Athabasca lowlands weren't always like this; the climate was once much warmer and drier. Humans may have been living here as far back as 10,500 years ago, though recent geological studies by University of Calgary geographer Derald Smith have shown that they would not have stayed long. Smith and his team have found evidence that 9,900 years ago a massive flash flood of glacial meltwater...