The Athabasca oilsands region has
the highest density of pre-contact
archeological sites in Alberta.
“The nice thing about
this stuff is that you can
fingerprint it.”
~ Dr. Brian Reeves,
Lifeways of Canada
Recognition of the area’s pre-contact historical value started as far back
as the commercial industry itself, with
the development of Great Canadian Oil
Sands (now Suncor) in the 1960s. In
the early 1970s, while the Syncrude
joint venture was surveying Lease 17—
near its current Mildred Lake facility—it
set aside part of the area because of
the archeological information the studies identified.
The most significant event in the
area—which shaped its landforms and
exposed the oilsands, enabling surface
mining—is described as “catastrophic.”
At the end of the last ice age, about
9,900 years ago, there was a great
flood. As the vast swatches of ice
receded, the drainage of giant glacial
Lake Agassiz was reversed into the
Arctic Ocean, pushing its waters rapidly
into the Clearwater River.
“The resulting flood created a wall
of water that roared through the
outlet, carving out the 100-metre
deep Clearwater Valley, down the
Athabasca, around the Fort Hills, into
Lake McConnell, parts of which are
now Lake Athabasca,” reports
Syncrude Canada and Birch
Mountain Resources. “Twenty-one
thousand cubic kilometres of water
poured into the Arctic Ocean in a
period of approximately 90 days,
raising the sea level worldwide by six
centimetres. Temperatures plummeted throughout the Northern
Hemisphere, resulting in an abrupt
cold snap lasting 100 years.”
As is outlined in archeological evidence, the Ancient Hunters soon
returned on a seasonal schedule.
“Within this newly exposed landscape lived the Ancestors,” Birch
