With two major local archaeological digs recently completed or underway, as well as an effort by Premier Kathleen Wynne to own up to the province’s treatment of First Nations peoples, the past is in the news these days both in Toronto and across Ontario.

Indeed, tangibly so.

The excavations — at the planned Toronto Courthouse site on Centre Ave., as well as the North St. Lawrence’s Market redevelopment site – are yielding thousands of artifacts that speak to the city’s social and commercial history from its early colonial past to the immigration that re-shaped Toronto in the early 20th century.

At the Courthouse site, located in The Ward, archaeologists also found an arrowhead, which reminds us of an even deeper history. That fragment takes its place among the millions of pre-contact First Nations objects excavated over the years from Ontario archaeological sites.

Despite the systematic excavation, mandated under Ontario’s planning and environmental assessment rules, there’s a troubling scandal buried in the policy framework that guides the province’s approach to this heritage.

The law requires the archaeological consultants retained by public agencies and developers to hold on to the artifacts in trust on behalf of the people of Ontario. But Queen’s Park has for years steadfastly refused to pass laws and provide funding to ensure these objects find their way into archives, museums or back to their rightful owners.

Consequently, some 20,000 boxes of artifacts, many filled with the material evidence of the lives of pre-contact indigenous peoples, languish in storage lockers, garages or the basements of archaeologists. While perhaps catalogued, these objects aren’t readily available to researchers, much less the general public, and, in many cases are simply forgotten.

The rich irony is that while Ontario has North America’s most robust archaeological preservation policy, almost no effort is made to interpret, commemorate and study those artifacts because the rules fall silent when it comes to the question of how to manage the material once it comes out of the ground.

That gap is a shocking abdication of the province’s duty to serve as a responsible steward of our collective past.

Other jurisdictions have sorted out this problem. In most U.S. states, for example, archaeologists working for clients must transfer artifacts to repositories, where they are catalogued, stored and made available to researchers or other institutions.

In New York, where archaeologists working for builders continue to turn up extensive finds, the City Museum of New York and the Landmarks Preservation Board two years ago established a partnership to store and display these discoveries. Toronto, by contrast, has a proactive archaeological management plan, and an Official Plan policy goal to ensure the objects remain within the jurisdiction. But the city has done almost nothing to deliver on that pledge, much less create an institution to display the historical artifacts that have surfaced.

Seven years ago, Western University anthropologist Neal Ferris, a former heritage official, persuaded Ottawa and Queen’s Park to provide $10 million for two London- and Hamilton-based facilities, Sustainable Archaeology, to properly house artifacts and make them available through digital scanning technology (both are collaboratively managed with First Nations). Strangely, the province never followed up with rules requiring archeologists to ensure that all the material they find at dig sites is transferred, either to these facilities or any other museum or archive.

Why does any of this matter? For First Nations people, these objects not only reveal much about pre-contact indigenous societies but also provide important evidence for land claims.

As for the artifacts discovered in more urban locales, such as the Courthouse site, the archaeological record provides rich and complex stories about the lives of ordinary people — stories not captured in official documents, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and high-level histories.

In both cases, all this archaeological heritage, when properly curated and interpreted, goes a long way towards filling out the picture: the found objects add dimension and texture, and often challenge stereotypes. The Courthouse results, for example, show the lives of the immigrants in The Ward in the late 19th century were richer than the prevailing narrative of squalid slum housing allows.

With only $5 million in funding, Queen’s Park could facilitate the migration of the 20,000 boxes of previously excavated artifacts into properly managed facilities. Once released, these materials will become powerful educational tools. They would also provide visitors with a richer understanding of the city and assist historians in documenting the societies that existed here before we arrived.

In a region populated with newcomers from countries with their own deep histories, there’s an enormous opportunity to use these archaeological discoveries as a means of connecting Ontario’s newest citizens to place, time and those who have lived on the land for many thousands of years.

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But the compelling power of this vast heritage will never be realized until Queen’s Park corrects an appalling historical mistake. The time to do that is now.