In the collections repository of the Woodland Cultural Centre, you’ll find an archaeological trove with tens of thousands of artifacts – from large fragments of pottery to ancient kernels of corn.
You could also find McMaster students, working with the Woodland Cultural Centre’s collections registrar, meticulously going through each artifact for clues about ancient Indigenous diets.
Project lead Lindi Masur, who manages the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility.
Their work is part of a year-long project between McMaster and the Woodland Cultural Centre, made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
The project involves analyzing starch grain residues from ceramic vessels and other artifacts in the care of the Woodland Cultural Centre, to better understand what ancient Indigenous populations in Ontario ate.
Lindi Masur, the project lead and an assistant professor in anthropology at McMaster, said the hope is that the work can help provide a broader understanding of Indigenous relationships with plants or even help revitalize Indigenous foodways. Understanding plant use in the past can also contribute to environmental knowledge, contemporary conservation issues, and reiterate the importance of Indigenous food sovereignty.
How it works
The project is looking at artifacts excavated from a site near Ohsweken in the 1980s. The collection has been the interest of many archaeologists in the past, who studied the pottery, plant and animal remains. Now, the research team is getting a different picture by looking at organic residues on the interior of the ceramics.
Lindi Masur and her team are analysing plant residues left on ceramics like this one from an Indigenous site in Brant County, Ontario.
In this region, archaeologists traditionally explored what people ate at archaeological sites through the analysis of carbonized plant remains – foods that could have accidentally burned during cooking or food waste that was preserved in refuse deposits called middens.
The researchers are now adding new techniques, like residue analysis including starch grain analysis, to tell new stories, she said.
New techniques allow researchers to examine the residues left on the ceramics that held food, and examine even microscopic plant particles that typically don’t preserve in middens, to get a broader understanding of what people consumed in the past.
It’s deeply methodical work. Since starting the project in February, Masur has had three research assistants working on it with her.
Undergraduate Research Assistant Aiysha Hussain analysing residue samples at the McMaster Paleoethnobotany Research Facility.
Anthropology undergraduate student Emma Jepson and Woodland Cultural Centre Collections Registrar Tara Froman go through the artifact boxes in the Woodland Cultural Centre’s collection, doing an inventory of materials, rehousing artifacts and pulling samples to analyze.
Anthropology MA student Rylan Godbout gently washes the surface of the vessels, using an ultrasonic cleaning device to extract plant residues from deep in the pores of the chosen vessels, and brings test tubes of residue samples back to the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility.
There, they use chemicals like hydrogen peroxide to oxidize carbonized material and sodium polytungstate to help separate and collect starch grains from other residues. The starch grains are mounted on slides, which undergraduate student Aiysha Hussain examines and matches to plant species.
Eye-opening ways to work with artifacts
“For a long time, the artifacts in the archaeology collection have gone under-researched,” said Jake Jamieson, Artistic and Programming Director of the Woodland Cultural Centre. “Some of the results that we’ve gotten so far have been really eye-opening for us in terms of opportunities of what we can do with our collection.”
For Masur, this project illustrates how archaeology isn’t always about excavating things, but finding ways to learn more from existing collections.
There are more artifacts in Ontario than can be safely stored at the moment. “How can we make these legacy collections relevant to our contemporary archaeological research?” Masur said.
Anthropology M.A. student Rylan Godbout (L) and undergraduate anthropology Research Assistant Emma Jepson (R) offering paleoethnobotany outreach at the Woodland Cultural Centre’s Spring Seed Day, May 10, 2025.
“I think what’s really important with that work, what we’re hearing [so far] from Lindi, is that it’s validating,” said Jamieson. “To know that the things we understood about our ancestors, and how they gathered and harvested, is what we thought they were doing. That’s been really rewarding.”
Another one of the really exciting outputs from the project, Jamieson said, is the ability to incorporate virtual renditions of some of these artifacts into their permanent collection, which is open to the public.
“There’s a whole section in our gallery that we have dedicated to the natural world around us, talking about Indigenous relationships to land and its resources,” Jamieson said. “Having these archaeology studies further helps us understand our ways of interacting with the food systems at the time.”
The partnership between the Woodland Cultural Centre and McMaster has also led to unexpected benefits, including outreach events to allow people who are interested in the field to interact with the artifacts. This fall, the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility and McMaster’s Archaeology Teaching Lab will host a field trip of youth from Six Nations to learn more about plant remains from archaeological sites.
“Any time we can get partners such as Lindi and McMaster University to come to the table, with funding, it’s really appreciated,” said Jamieson.
This project has been a great first few steps, Jamieson said. With so many artifacts in the collection, many opportunities remain to explore all the stories that they might hold.