2019 Special Achievement Award: Ron Williamson, Archaeologist

His Ontario pre-contact history lecturer told the wide-eyed group of students that people had been on the land at Western for 12,000 years. According to Ron, “I went up to him after the lecture and volunteered in his lab for the rest of my undergraduate time – I never looked back!”

From there, Ron took Highway 401 to McGill where he studied under the mentorship of Bruce Trigger, focussing on pre-contact settlement patterns. At the same time, new roads were being build, and the government needed archaeologists.

It has since become one of the leading and largest companies and has completed over 5,000 projects. Almost 90% of archaeology in Canada is commercially-driven, with clients from the private sector (land and infrastructure developers), public works, and First Nations.

Through ASI, Ron has used contract archaeology “to design and conduct good, thorough, and ground-breaking archaeological research that might be the envy of many pure research institutions,” according to another award citation from 2016.

The site was disturbed accidentally, when a fence post was driven into the ossuary’s very centre. According to Ron, when the indigenous community saw what had happened, they responded: “this pierced the souls of the people here.”

Elders requested that the ossuary be relocated, rather than be kept under a busy park. Each bone was moved individually to a secret location, to avoid further disturbance.

The site, first excavated in 2002, was enclosed by a palisade with 95 longhouses, each about 37 square metres in size. The community farmed 80 square kilometres and the site featured an open plaza and developed waste management system. More than 150,000 artefacts were discovered, most safeguarded by the Canadian Museum of History.

In addition to the breadth of information recovered from the site, one particular artefact stood out: a piece of iron that had been worked by Indigenous people. The earliest European piece of iron found in the North American interior, it was most likely traded into the area a century before Europeans began colonizing the Great Lakes region.

The site was renamed in honour of Jean-Baptiste Lainé, a decorated Huron-Wendat veteran of the Second World War. Pictured above at the renaming ceremony are archaeologists, members of the Huron-Wendat Nation, staff from the Whitchurch-Stouffvile Museum, and the Mayor of Whitchurch-Stouffville.

In addition to this fieldwork, Ron helped to pioneer the development of Archaeological Management Plans in Ontario; a proactive tool developed for municipal and regional governments to strategically and efficiently incorporate archaeological resource assessment into their land use planning and development process.

At the basis of Toronto’s Archaeological Management Plan is was the Master Plan of Archaeological Resources for the City of Toronto (2004), co-directed by Ron. The plan, which is available online, identifies areas of archaeological potential and requires archaeological assessments on these lands prior to development.

The Archaeological Institute of America presented the 2016 Conservation and Heritage Management Award to Heritage Preservation Services and ASI for work in developing, implementing and maintaining an Archaeological Management Plan for the City of Toronto.

These include Death or Canada (2006), Hangman’s Graveyard (2009), Curse of the Axe (2011), and Toronto Unearthed (2017) which have advanced public understanding and appreciation of Toronto’s early land uses, histories, and settlement patterns.

His past service to the sector has included president of the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals, and service on the Heritage Toronto Board, as well as those of both provincial and national archaeological associations. Currently, he is the President of the Board of Directors of the Museum of Ontario Archaeology at Western University.

Although he retired as a managing partner of ASI in 2016, Ron remains curious and active in the research and public education areas of archaeology: Last year, he co-authored a research paper, which made international news, about the 2010 finding of charred quinoa seeds just outside of the GTA in Brantford.