Artifactually_Ancient ARTIFACTUALLY At its greatest extent, some 14,000 years ago, the latest ice age covered most, if not all, of what we now know as Ontario. As the ice retreated it left a glacial lake which we call Lake Iroquois. It was an enlarged version of the current Lake Ontario and its north shore ran a few kilometres north of the current one, locally though our villages of Camborne and Baltimore. SPEAKING Artifacts FROM LONG, LONG AGO This projectile point and chert* date from the Early Archaic era. That was 8,000 to 10,000 years ago! *Chert: a hard, dark, opaque rock composed of silica (chalcedony) which naturally breaks to produce very sharp edges. It was there, at the north shore of Lake Iroquois, that early Indigenous people must have met and camped and hunted and left indicators of their visits. Our earliest artifacts are owned by a member of the Museum's Exhibit Team. They were uncovered by chance in the 1960s by a resident digging in a garden just north of Cobourg. The layers of beach sand there, about a meter deep, mark the shoreline of ancient Lake Iroquois. Courtesy of Al Seymour