Abstract

The Archaeological Resource Centre of the Toronto Board of Education has recently begun compiling a material-history database for the City of Toronto. The inception, process and preliminary results of the database will be presented and discussed. The information it contains relates to the introduction and impact of technological advances on urban life in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The database is computerized and essentially open-ended. It is correlated with the database system used for analyzing artifacts at the Archaeological Resource Centre, and is intended to provide a social-historical context for artifact interpretation of sites within Toronto. Use of the database addresses several problems associated with the investigation of historic urban, domestic and small-commercial sites.