Every year for the past nine years archaeological students from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada have been conducting field schools in the Wanuskewin Heritage Park, near Saskatoon, specifically an area of the Park known as the Wolf Willow dig site. The Park had been set up to honour the First Nations people and explore their culture and spirituality.
     The area had supported human occupation for over 6,000 years and so was an ideal place for studying the First Nations anthropology and archaeology. It was on the last day of the very last summer dig that an excited student, Kristina Chomyshen, made an exciting and quite significant discovery.
     The culture of the Northern Plains of Canada can be traced back to 8,000 BCE and are sometimes referred to as the Gowen Culture after the discoverer Charles Gowen, from the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Saskatchewan, following an accidental uncovering of archaeology by heavy earth moving equipment in 1977.
     Since then the search has been ongoing to discover more evidence of this culture although, until the discovery by Kristina, very little had been found within the Park. What she had found was the tip of a Gowen dart, which predates the arrow and which was used by hunters over 6,000 years ago.
     Despite this significant discovery the University is still closing the field camp. Glenn Stuart, faculty member from the University, is quoted as saying "You're always finding something and learning new things, but we're kind of thinking that maybe it's time to leave the site alone. We always want to leave stuff, you never want to excavate the whole site".

Edited from Saskatoon StarPhoenix (8 July 2019)