Shell Fossil

While at an archaeological site that I survey on a regular basis, I picked up a very small piece of a stone material known as Hudson Bay Lowland (HBL) chert.  There is no bedrock source for this type of rock on Lac Seul and it is assumed that this material originates from somewhere in the Hudson Bay Lowlands and was glacially transported to the region over 10,000 years ago during the last period of continental glaciation.  The rock was triangular in shape and appeared to have some edge flaking so I thought it was possibly the broken tip of a projectile point.

I bagged it up along with the other artifacts I surface collected from the site that day.  A few days later I was back in the lab and opened the bag to look through the material.  Most of the artifacts had clay and/or other soils adhered to their outer surface requiring removal with a soft brush prior to examination.  After cleaning up the small triangular shaped HBL chert piece I noticed something remained stuck to the surface.  I picked up the magnifying glass to get a closer look at it.

Although the artifact had been culturally modified it did not appear to be the broken tip of a projectile point and was more likely a shatter flake or an exhausted core.  However, I was amazed to see a tiny but perfectly shaped shell fossil embedded onto the surface of the chert.  The shell was not something of local origin stuck to the exterior of the rock but was in fact a marine brachiopod several millions years old that had been deposited within the layers of silica based microscopic organisms that were compressed into the material now known as HBL chert.  From a very long time ago and hundreds of kilometers away, this fossilized shell was glacially transported thousands of years ago into the Lac Seul region within a material discovered and utilized by a pre-contact indigenous population to form part of the archaeological record for the lake.  A finding truly worthy of being classified as a “cool discovery”!