The Potential for Archaeological Discovery in Organic Terrain in Canada
Ken Swayze
PART ONE - ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY IN ORGANIC TERRAIN
The information presented in this overview was derived from a literature search of scientific periodicals and monograph series which commonly publish, or specialize in, Canadian archaeological studies, and unpublished manuscripts in the archives of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. A second source of information came from canvassing the Provincial and Territorial archaeological site databases by querying their 'environmental', 'notes' and 'comments' data-entry fields for such keywords as: peat, bog, swamp, marsh, fen, muskeg, muck, and marl. The structure of these databases varies considerably and some are difficult to query in this manner. Furthermore, many forms were incompletely filled-out originally and they vary in terms of the entry fields, although they are all variations of a 'Borden form'. Although the canvass information provides a sense of the association of organic terrain to archaeological phenomena, the survey is 'unscientific', so absolute frequencies and percentages are not presented.
