In early 2021, I had the opportunity to analyze an interesting assemblage of faunal remains recovered from a Middle Dorset site on the west coast of Newfoundland. Most of the interesting things are either taxonomic or taphonomic, and would likely bore (taphonomy pun) audience members out of their seats. But out of nearly 7000 fragments of bone, I identified six as walrus – and I’ve been thinking about them ever since. Walrus seem never to have been particularly abundant, or at least abundantly accessed, on the island of Newfoundland, where Dorset sites are the most numerous of all Indigenous sites known to date. Join me as I, despite having little supporting evidence, explore the concept of longing in the archaeological record of the Dorset in Newfoundland, and in a discussion of some of the possible causes, implications, and parallels elsewhere.

In the late 1980s, Dr. Bev Nicholson described Vickers Focus pottery, reminiscent of Plains Woodland wares from widely scattered southern Manitoba sites. Such Plains Woodland pottery is associated with semi-sedentary forager-farmer lifestyles in the south, and Bev wondered about its presence north of the generally agreed limit of Indigenous agricultural production. In 1993 he invited Scott Hamilton to join him in investigating such sites in the Lauder Sandhills. Our scotch-talk often revolved around whether Vickers Focus represented a northward expansion of forager-horticulturalists, or whether they adapted in favour of mobile foraging. If the former, how did they manage it so far north, if the latter why did they occupy places removed from conventional archaeological expectations, and what evidence was required to address such questions?

This introduced us to new techniques far beyond our primary training and contributed to the training of several academic generations of students. Hindsight forces me to wince at some of our assumptions, but our work clarified that the distinction between mobile foraging and agricultural village life was a continuum rather than a binary choice, and that adaptive flexibility plays a significant role in human history.

One outgrowth of a paper I published back in the Stone Age was the general idea (only in my head) that cultural change can result from a misunderstanding of the meaning of items of material culture. In a nutshell: somebody attributes an erroneous significance to a piece of material culture, starts behaving as though they had got it right, and their mistake becomes the new accepted meaning of the item in question. In some cases, the results can be quite profound.

The cultural resource management industry in Ontario is witnessing some bewildering times. Never in the course of their careers could archaeologists envision a scenario where they would be conducting test pit survey and excavation smack dab in the middle of a very active, contemporary cemetery, amongst standing stones, intact graves, personal commemorations, and active mourners. Yet here we are, on a regular basis, undertaking such work as a result of legislative knitting of two disparate pieces of legislation and regulatory oversight. This paper outlines the situation in an effort to seek input from others on how to unravel this untenable situation.