My name is Oscar Chisholm and I am an Anthropology Major at McGill, with the aspiration of one day working in the field of Archaeology. In the past, I have been fortunate enough to do archaeological fieldwork on the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island, where I grew up. Before I started university, I was also volunteering as an assistant to the Archaeology Collections Manager at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, and have continued to go back to volunteer since then. When I began to take classes with Professor Peter Johansen at McGill, I mentioned to him that I was from Vancouver Island, and had spent a lot of time at the museum in Victoria. He related to me that he works as a consultant for a First Nations tribal council in the interior of BC, and that he had been putting together a research proposal to work on an assemblage of stone tools from a set of prehistoric sites, at the request of this tribal council. This assemblage, along with all other archaeological data and material collected in BC, is housed in the RBCM, and so, with my previous experience there, along with my desire to try my hand at lithics analysis, we began to outline a plan for an internship in the summer of 2020.
The original plan for this internship was for me to work from the RBCM in Victoria. At first, I was going to have to do some research on the background of this assemblage. This assemblage comes from a series of investigations that took place in the early 1980s, at a series of lake sites in the interior of BC. I cannot disclose the names and locations of these sites, or the companies that worked on them, for confidentiality reasons. These archaeological sites have since been completely destroyed by extensive resource exploitation, and so the data in the reports and fieldnotes, as well as the artifacts themselves, are the only ways we can now study and reinterpret these archaeological sites. Then, I was to do a debitage analysis of the artifacts themselves, looking closely at the ways the stones were fractured, (in archaeological terms: knapped), and calculating ratios between different kinds and amounts of debris, to hopefully draw conclusions about the kinds of tools that were being made, and the scale of human activity that was taking place, at each of these sites.
As the global pandemic grew increasingly severe, the RBCM suspended their summer internships, and so Professor Johansen and I changed the nature of the internship significantly to make it possible to do it remotely. It shifted focus from lithics analysis to archival work. Professor Johansen sent me all of the archaeological reports and fieldnotes for this group of sites, well over 2000 pages of text, tables, and figures, and I was to essentially mine these documents for the data within them and reorganize this data to make it easier to reinterpret these sites. This reorganization manifested in one Excel spreadsheet and one word document, with bullet-pointed notes on the spatial and processual information for each of these sites.
There were several challenges over the course of doing this internship remotely. Firstly, Professor Johansen, needed to take a necessary leave of absence from his post at McGill, starting at the beginning of August, so for half of the internship, I had to make do with the instructions and guidance he had already given me. Secondly, the amount of time spent at home during this pandemic has taken a heavy toll on my mental health, and I began to struggle with depression in ways I never have. I began to see a therapist, which resulted in opening up about struggles with trauma and addictions of various kinds in my recent past, and once I began to unpack these things, it became difficult to control when my emotions would well up or overwhelm me. However, that being said, I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to do this internship. My parents have faced economic struggle in this pandemic like many others, and the money I received with this internship meant that I was able to make money and help out, without having to work as a front line worker, and simultaneously getting to focus on and learning about something that I really love.
In closing, I would like to thank the Arts Internship Office and its donors for a really great opportunity for learning, income, and daily structure, during such a tumultuous time, personally and globally. I would also like to thank Professor Johansen, who was so patient and understanding with me, and for introducing me to such a valuable experience.
