Hello, my name is Éric Graillon. I am an archaeologist
at the Sherbrooke Museum of Nature and Science.
I am working at a site in the Sherbrooke region,
along the St. Francis River in southern Quebec.
Until recently, the oldest occupancies
of the St. Francis River watershed dated back some 6 000 to 6 500 years.
At that time, Indigenous peoples regularly
visited the St. Francis River watershed.
There was no trace of any previous occupancy.
It wasn't until 2011 that a site dating back to
the Palaeoindian period was first discovered, on the Gaudreau site
in Weedon, located at the confluence
of the Salmon and St. Francis rivers.
It was a small settlement. Hunters made a stop there
and maybe cleaned their tools before
continuing on their journey. Two years later,
while an inventory was being conducted in the City
of Sherbrooke’s Borough of Brompton, a second site was discovered.
The people who spent time there may have been the same
from the Weedon site, but the inhabitation was of a larger scale.
When they arrived in the region, about
10 000 years ago, the occupants of the Kruger site,
here in Brompton, like the occupants of the Gaudreau site
in Weedon, were the first to use local resources.
Different materials from the region that
they used to make their tools have been found.
In addition, they had brought materials from other regions,
which they had perhaps acquired through trading,
possibly on their travels since they moved around a great deal.
These materials were from Maine,
others from New Hampshire, even some from the Lake Champlain region.
We are currently in the early stages of excavation
and still have a lot to learn about these people,
but we can undoubtedly state that representatives
of the Plano culture were well established
in the St. Francis River watershed
about 10 000 years ago.
The stone in my hands holds
a lot of meaning for us.
When we found the Kruger site
here in 2013, we were conducting an inventory.
My assistant Sylvain came to see me.
In his surveys, he had found two small pieces of this stone.
He came to show them to me.
We immediately looked at one another and knew
that we had just discovered a second Palaeoindian site
along the St. Francis River, simply because
the tools that had been found in Weedon
three years earlier had been chipped from
this same material, which was unknown elsewhere
along the St. Francis River watershed.