You can experience first-hand the Huron-Wendat village of around 2,000 people which flourished 500 years ago in what is now southeast Stouffville.
The Archaeology Alive! exhibition at the Whitchurch-Stouffville Museum tells the story of these enterprising people, with stories from elders, a wealth of artifacts and information and a 3D gaming format where you can experience life in a traditional longhouse.
The local village thrived for several decades, with around 90 longhouses, many of them measuring 20 by 100 feet. Vast cornfields surrounded the village, with corn making up more than half of this First Nations’ diet.
Around the year 2000 a developer found a few tantalizing artifacts and soon brought in archaeologists. By the time Dr. Ron Williamson and his team finished their three-year exploration of the site in 2005, they had found around 150,000 artifacts. One unexpected find was a metal axe head of European origin that was traded into this area—long before official European contact.
This Stouffville site is the most complex and significant ancestral Wendat-Huron
 settlement of that era to be discovered in southern Ontario. Some of the inhabitants originally came from areas such as the Niagara Peninsula and Newfoundland, later research revealed.  Originally called the Mantle site for the family on whose land the artifacts were found, it is now named after decorated World War 2 Huron-Wendat veteran Jean-Baptiste Laine.
The 3D gaming format starts with you outside in nature, listening to gurgling water and dogs barking in the background. Entering the longhouse and you see where people slept, where they cooked their meals and look up to where various objects such as baskets were stored near the tops of the 20-foot-high structures.
Children are fascinated with a game similar to Jacks that the Huron-Wendat kids played half a millennium ago. Artifacts also include an almost-intact pot, needles and other implements of daily living on loan from the Canadian Museum of History and the Huron-Wendat Museum near Quebec City, where several thousand Huron-Wendat have a thriving modern-day community.
Kathy Amenta, a historical interpreter for visiting schoolchildren who leads tours of the exhibition, noted that local people are interested in the exact location of the site. Some of them are the residents who saw the building of their new homes delayed significantly until the archaeological dig was finished. They are interested to see what the village is all about.
The exhibition has drawn a flurry of interest, boosting the number of tours at the Museum significantly, with people visiting from as far away as Costa Rica who are intrigued to compare the designs created by local First Nations people with indigenous art back home.
Maxime Picard travelled from his Wendake community’ located near Quebec City, to be present at the exhibition’s opening, representing Grand Chief Konrad Sioui.  “As a nation, we have the richest archaeological heritage in all of Ontario,” Mr. Picard noted.
He was profoundly moved when he got to hold some of the artifacts. “It is hard to describe the feeling,” he said, “like we are re-connecting with our people.”
At the opening of the Archaeology Alive! exhibition, Mr. Picard expressed his gratitude to Stouffville and to the museum. “This is another step forward towards reconciliation,” he said. “We are no longer alone. We have learned to live together.”
The Museum presents ‘An Evening with Dr. Ron Williamson’ November 9, where the archaeologist will talk in depth about this provincially significant 16th Century Huron-Wendat  village he helped unearth in the heart of Stouffville.
The exhibition continues until June 2020. For more information on the Huron-Wendat society, you can watch the film, ‘The Curse of the Axe’, log on to townofws.ca, head to Museum or call 905-727-8954 or 1-888-290-0337.
*This article was also published in the November 2019 issue of the Stouffville Free Press and stouffville,com.