UNBF student finds lost piece of history

University of New Brunswick Fredericton Press Release

January 29, 2004 - In 1995, when Brent Suttie was still in high school and hanging around the family cottage in Charlotte County’s Lake Utopia, he ventured out on a hike.

What a hike it turned out to be as Mr. Suttie stumbled across some stone tools that eventually propelled him on his career path.

His chance discovery led to the oldest radiocarbon-dated archaeological site in New Brunswick. Almost nine years later, Mr. Suttie is a student in the anthropology graduate program at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.

“I have always been interested in archaeology and the stone tools only heightened my interest,” said Mr. Suttie, a native of Black’s Harbour. “When I found them, I had no idea how old any of them were. Since coming to UNB, I’ve been able to find out so much more about them.”

David Black, a professor of archaeology and chair of the department of anthropology, became involved with the site in 1999 when Mr. Suttie was an undergraduate student, taking a bachelor of arts degree in classical studies and anthropology.

“Brent showed me some stone tools that I believed were older than artifacts recovered during my own research,” said Dr. Black. “I’ve been conducting archaeological research in coastal Charlotte County since 1981, and because of rising sea levels and shoreline erosion, artifacts older than 3,000 years are rarely found on the coast.”

Dr. Black believed the stone tools Mr. Suttie found at Mill Lake were from a time archaeologists call the Archaic period, dating back 3,000 to 8,000 years.

Since 1995, Mr. Suttie has discovered and recorded five archaeological sites on the shores of Mill Lake. During the autumn of 2001, and summer and fall of 2003, he and some assistants from UNB’s Geoarchaeology Research Group, excavated two of them, one at Mill Lake Island and one at Mill Lake Bluff. They produced assemblages of stone tools, burned animal bones and carbonized plant remains.

In December of 2003, with funding provided by the Government of New Brunswick’s Archaeological Services Unit under the Culture and Sport Secretariat, Mr. Suttie was able to have wood charcoal from these sites analyzed by Miami’s Beta Analytic Inc., the world’s largest radiocarbon-dating service.

The Mill Lake Island site is approximately 6,000 years old and the Mill Lake Bluff site is about a thousand years older. The stone tools Mr. Suttie found in 1995 are among the earliest evidence of people living in what is now New Brunswick.

Mr. Suttie’s work provides clues to events almost lost in the distant past.

“Brent’s thesis addresses a poorly understood part of the cultural history of New Brunswick,” said Dr. Black. “During that period, people made distinctive sets of tools such as plummets, slate knives and large stemmed projectile points not made in other periods. Brent’s work has important implications for archeological research in New Brunswick. It has the potential to change both where archeologists look for sites and how they apply techniques to detect and evaluate sites containing very old archeological remains.”

Mr. Suttie hopes to have his thesis completed by the end of this summer and expects it to lead him into more research.

“We’ve made significant progress and have more understanding, but there’s so much more left to do,” he said. “We can perhaps understand how people used the stone tools, what time of year people lived at these sites, why they chose these places to live, what animals they hunted and fished for and what plants they gathered. That’s far beyond what we could have said before. Archaeological research is a time-consuming process because we try to make sure everything we’re putting forward in terms of conclusions is substantiated by date, but patience is a virtue.”