St. John's Archaeology in the Sewer

Ugh... just when I thought I'd finally gotten over the jetlag, they go and cut another hour out of the day. I could have used that hour today. The end of the fiscal year is approaching and a couple of my current jobs have end of March deadlines looming. This is going to be a busy week of wrapping projects up. I don't even want to think about it until I get a cup of coffee, so here's something completely different.

There's been a massive archaeology project going on right under our noses in downtown St. John's for the past few years. You've probably seen the construction rerouting the sewer lines away from "The Bubble" in the harbour towards the new water treatment plant on the Southside Hills. Some of the hardhats on that project are worn by archaeologists monitoring the excavations. The lead archaeologist, Gerry Penney, gave an interesting talk at The Rooms a couple weeks ago about the project and The Telegram has put his illustrated talk online as a .pdf slideshow called: Under the Street: Archaeology and the Harbour Interceptor Sewer Project. There's a lot of interesting information in there about the history of St. John's. (if that link stops working, the same presentation is archived on the city's website here)

There are a couple of articles in this weekend's Telegram about the project as well. I'm not sure how long the Telegram archives their articles for, but at the moment you can read them at these links:

What lies beneath: Sewage work allows archeology team to uncover truths about downtown St. John’s

Shawnadithit graveyard found: Experts believe last Beothuk buried under Southside Road

Photo Credits:
1: Tim Rast
2: Gerry Penney

Photo Captions:
1: One of the reproductions that needs to be finished!
2: Title slide from Gerry Penney's talk