Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Weston's archaeological sites

There are two archaeological sites in Weston and this morning I visited the Toronto Reference Library to see if I could document where exactly they might be. The book was Victor Konrad's 1973 "The archaeological resources of the Toronto planning area". I was more than a little disappointed with what little detail I found.


The two open circles represent Weston's two sites in the then- Borough of York, the upper-left one called "Scarlett Rd." (AkGv-5) and the lower-right one called "Bellevue Cr." (AkGv-6). I dealt with the Bellevue Crescent "Weston bones" site here, so we know the exact location of it. The circle in Konrad's map has it too far to the right by some 250 meters. I wonder if the Scarlett Rd. circle is similarly displaced. At the very least that would bring it closer to Scarlett Road which lies on the other side of the Humber River (the thick wavy line to the left of the circles).

Clearly the circles were not meant to be an accurate placement of the archaeological sites. Konrad lists the Scarlett Rd. site in the Borough of York (a 1967 municipality that absorbed the former town of Weston) but the actual Scarlett Road is not in that borough. Rather, it is in the adjacent municipality of Etobicoke. This discrepancy should be resolvable by a reference that notes the exact location of AkGv-5 but I can't seem to find an original source. It's not just the archaeological sites that have disappeared. Even the information about them is slowly becoming lost!

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