Archaeologists unearth the past at Kingston’s Fort Frontenac

They’ve been at it for two weeks now and their hard work is paying off.

Archaeologists have been digging in a parking lot at Fort Frontenac, looking for historical artifacts to gain insight into the city’s past. Nick Gromoff with Ground Truth Archaeology heads up the team.

“We’ve found the east bastion of Fort Frontenac, French Fort Frontenac. We weren’t sure if it was going to be intact,” Gromoff said. “There’s been a lot of grading in this area, graded away a lot of the resources sort of in the last 100 years.

“But we were happy to find that it was still intact.”

2:21 Getting behind the Fort Frontenac wall as the restoration work continues.

The French fort was built in 1673 and rebuilt in 1675 and 1695. The current dig needs to be completed prior to some infrastructure work at the fort and Gromoff says so far, so good.

“There weren’t a lot of deposits associated with the inside of it but we got a nice deposit on the south wall of the bastion. Fur trade-era material: gun flints, beaver jaws, fish bones, trade beads, things like that,” Gromoff said.

“Whenever you are looking at French occupation, French deposits in Ontario, it’s pretty significant. There’s only a few sites, a handful of sites in Ontario where the French got a foothold and this is probably the largest one.

“Any little window we can get on that period is golden to us.”

12:01 Lubomyr Luciuk looks back at the 100 year anniversary of Canada’s first internment operations

Any artifacts found will remain at the fort or somewhere at Canadian Forces Base Kingston.