Lawson Digital Exhibit

In 2017, as part of his Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellowship in partnership with TMHC, Josh Dent wanted to generate a template for digital exhibitions that TMHC could use to provide extra value to clients and assist in disseminating information to interested communities. Interested in how to digitize older archaeological research and media, Josh had been assisting the Museum of Ontario Archaeology to catalogue documents from the Museum’s past. Those documents and binders full of old photograph slides and negatives pointed to one site that had seen a lot of fieldwork but relatively little in the way of digitization, the Lawson Site adjacent the Museum and TMHC.

Original Museum of Ontario Archaeology Site Concept

Using scanning equipment and software at Sustainable Archaeology to digitize slides and negatives, and working with the Museum’s curator, Nicole Aszalos to track down documentary evidence, Josh drew from previous research, notably from TMHC’s own Matthew Beaudoin’s report State of the Lawson Site, to generate the Lawson Exhibit. The exhibit chronicles archaeology at the Lawson Site across over a century of fieldwork. The shifting priorities of archaeologists through time and the resurgent presence of Indigenous peoples both at Lawson and in archaeology generally, are represented. The story of the Lawson Site parallels the story of archaeology.

Lawson Site Excavation 1980

Accessible through TMHC’s website, the exhibit will also be on display at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology on the Ideum touch-display.