OAiS Lab 01 · Years 1–2
Crawford Lake
Kionywarihwae
Reading a lake core for more than one beginning
- Location
- Milton, Ontario, Canada
- Coordinates
- 43.47°, -79.95°
- Field intensive
- Years 1–2
In 2023 the Anthropocene Working Group nominated Crawford Lake as the global marker for a proposed Anthropocene epoch. The lake's Wendat name, Kionywarihwae, means “where we have a story to tell.” We go there to read the core sample for the stories a single golden spike leaves out.
The ground
What this site holds
- 01
Crawford Lake is meromictic: its layers never mix, so each year settles as a distinct varve and stays put. The record is unusually legible.
- 02
The Working Group read the core for plutonium from mid-century nuclear testing. The same core holds corn pollen from twelfth- to fifteenth-century Iroquoian farming, a collapse in tree pollen from settler logging, and sediment from George Crawford's nineteenth-century sawmill.
- 03
The International Commission on Stratigraphy voted the epoch down in March 2024. The site remains the sharpest available record of how empire registers in sediment.
Research questions
- What changes when the core is read for multiple and diachronous drivers rather than one clean stratigraphic signal?
- How does a site of Indigenous sovereignty become a global scientific reference point, and on whose terms?
- What does Anthropocene research owe to reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples?
Planned outputs
- Site-specific locative media installation at Conservation Halton
- Summer Institute and Spec Life Symposium, Concordia (Year 1)
- Co-authored articles on diachronous readings of the core
Cluster leads
McCarthy
Brock University
Jill Didur
Concordia University
Diabo
Conservation Halton Indigenous Governance
Kregg Hetherington
Concordia University
Partners on this lab
Conservation Halton
Milton, Ontario
Brock University
St. Catharines, Ontario
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec