Whitewater POW Camp Archaeology Project

Project volunteers and the Brandon University Field School students have been working extremely hard during these first couple weeks of August – we’ve been excavating 5 days a week at the site, and have made great progress. We are in fact currently finishing off the final 3 of the 25 excavation units planned for this summer’s work. Additionally, the excavations have produced large amounts of artifacts, about 40 boxes full so far.

The field work photo album has just been updated, so you can see all the latest action by clicking here! Also, we’ve taken a few photos of artifacts in the field and at the field lab, and those photos are here.

Last year we had a blog post about an interesting German Red Cross tin can we found (see that old post here) – amazingly, over the last week we discovered an additional 7 of these particular tins. And each of those 7 is in far better condition than the single tin we found last year.

The tins say “Deutsches Rotes Kreuz” “Schokolade” “Hildebrand Berlin” – telling us that the tins were likely sent to the Whitewater PoW Camp by the German Red Cross and contained chocolate (of course!). The manufacturer was Hildebrand, a chocolatier in Berlin.

Intriguingly, these tins are the only artifacts we have excavated on site that have any clear symbolism of Nazi Germany. See below for some images: the upper album contains photos of the tins we excavated this week, and the lower album contains some photos of what the tins would have looked like if they were as new.

Greetings friends!

Adrian here, writing with a brief update on our progress this summer. We’ve completed six 1 meter x 1 meter excavation units, five of those were placed at the camp’s large trash midden, and one in front of the camp’s garbage incinerator. The units at the trash midden produced so many artifacts that we stopped after those five units, instead of completing the eight units originally planned for that area.

We have 14 more units to complete this summer, and we’re going to tackle those remaining units starting on 29 July, when the Brandon University Field School arrives on site to start their month of work on the project.

One of the more intriguing things we’ve found is a dog skull and skeleton. We know that the PoWs had pet dogs in the camps (several dogs appear in historical photos), so seemingly the most likely explanation for the skeleton would be that one of those pets died and they buried the carcass in the camp’s trash dump.

We’ve been taking photos of our fieldwork, and a selection of them are below.

Thanks for reading this short update, and stay tuned!

Adrian Myers

Greetings everyone,

After another week of canoe research this 2011 field season (following a week of work in summer 2010 – see this old blog post and these photos), I’m pleased to report that the recording of all of the known canoes is almost complete. During the week that I was out here in Manitoba we accomplished several important and detail-oriented tasks related to the canoes: First, on the 5^th of July, myself and two volunteers (Michael and Rachel) used Michael’s inflatable raft to paddle up the Little Saskatchewan River and into Whitewater Lake. The purpose of this little adventure was to take a closer look at the dock structure and the submerged canoe located in the middle of the river, and to paddle out to Elk Island, to see if there were any identifiable remains related to the prisoner’s excursions there. Both the submerged canoe and dock structures were located and photographed (see the Field Work photo album!). Unfortunately no evidence of the PoWs was found on Elk Island.

On July 8^th volunteer Josh Allen and I went back to the Fort Dauphin Museum, in Dauphin Manitoba. The purpose of this trip was to record and sketch the two-man paddle canoe that was not recorded during last year’s visit. The other main task while at the museum was to identify, record and analyze any tool marks (markings on the wood that reveal what tools were used) present on the canoes. We were excited to find that both of the canoes at the Fort Dauphin had intact tool marks. Tool mark analysis can help us determine what types of tools were used during the fashioning of the canoe as well as the methods used. Based on the preliminary field assessment, both canoes exhibited tool marks suggesting that chisels, axes, saws, hand augers, adzes and hammers were used by the prisoners.

Also, Parks Canada has agreed to take a small sample from one of the canoes still on site at the camp for a wood species analysis – a test that will tell us what type of tree was used to build the canoe.

As always I have greatly enjoyed my time here working at the Whitewater PoW Camp Dig and I’m excited to continue researching these historic canoes.

Thanks for reading,

Tim Dodson

Boating on Whitewater Lake

Hello Whitewater blog readers and the new season of excavation. I am thrilled to be returning again this year as a volunteer. Adrian and I have been at Wasagaming (the village at the Riding Mountain National Park entrance) since Monday, doing a host of preparatory work before today’s official start. The Season Three “command center” is a comfortable, if Spartan, summer cabin on the imaginatively named Misty Lane. With the cottonwoods erupting furiously it is presently, however, more snowdrift looking than misty.

Record-setting rain this Spring is evident at the former PoW camp site: the grass is a foot or more higher and the 2010 test units beside the pond are submerged. Also, we are told by those who know that while the mosquitoes are certainly more abundant (and I would never have thought this possible) the ticks are fewer. An interesting trade off, and stay tuned on the outcome, but I suspect it is more like getting death by firing squad rather than by hanging.

Despite the effects of last month’s weather the site is now drenched in sun and the ten kilometre road we cycle is, for now, strangely free of last year’s wearisome mud. Laden with gear and joined by Suyoko Tsukamoto and Phil Innes of Brandon University we rode through swarms of dragonflies and a thousand billion gnats, flies, and mosquitoes that happened across the road. The random intersection left bugs bouncing off my forehead and one that managed to do a cannonball in my eye.

With everyone eager and happy, the first two excavation units were begun. They are located at the camp’s “official” dump site (the “unofficial” dump sites will be excavated later this season – see the Project Research Design for more information) located 500 meters to the northeast of the main camp area. Happily, my first task was not out of my purview of knowledge at all: yard work. With a weed eater I carved a small oasis in the tall grass while the others laid out gear and meticulously plotted the units. 32K2C and D are situated beside test units that last year revealed rich deposits of historical material culture. For the next six hours we worked under intense sun, alternately hunched over a unit, trowel in hand, or working a ¼ mesh screen, as though ancient winnowers. It was not glamorous, and it was not high tech, but it was still spectacularly fun.

Adrian and Phil worked together while the ill-fated Suyoko was my teacher for the day. Predictably, I did all the things newbies do: plunging the trowel downward, muscling artefacts from their place, calling rocks bones and bones rocks, obsessing to go down further, convinced that the real treasure is just under the next centimetre. And so on. The virtue of Suyoko’s patience – and her occasional “NO!” – eventually schooled me in three vital areas which, admittedly, are not innately mine: to be tender with delicate things, to observe more than conjecture, and for God’s sake, to go slow.

By 6:30 pm Suyoko and I had three quadrants of one unit dug to 30cm deep, and bagged what looks to me like a thousand artefacts of bone, teeth, remains of cans, enamel, pottery, nails, foil, eggshell, bottle caps, buttons, and whatnots. A great beginning! But then I do the math: if a thousand artefacts are extracted every day, my son Adrian could well be doing his lab work long after I become an artefact myself.

Paul Myers

Excavating at 32K2

space

Greetings friends!

Parks Canada has just released this neat short video. It’s titled Whitewater German Prisoner of War Camp, and was made by Christopher Paetkau for Parks Canada, during our 2010 summer field season last year. You can watch the video on YouTube here, or just click the video below (7 minutes).

(Note: If you would like the video with Closed Captioning, watch it from the Parks Canada website)

space

space