U of S team mapping unmarked graves at Saskatoon graveyard

A group of archaeology students at the University of Saskatchewan are working to identify a number of unmarked graves at a more than a century-old cemetery in Saskatoon.

There are 162 known burials at Nutana Pioneer Cemetery, 51 of which are babies and 14 are children under the age of 16, according to the City of Saskatoon.

Terence Clark, a professor with the U of S Archaeology and Anthropology department, is leading the project.

Clark said ground-penetrating radar and electro-magnetometry devices will be used to give the project the clearest possible picture of what is beneath the ground.

“We’re really interested in finding shallow children’s graves — and those are really hard to find,” he said. “So, we’re going to line up all of these technologies at Nutana and then hopefully use it in other cases in the future.”

The locations of 18 gravesites are unknown at the 137-year-old cemetery.

The first person was buried at Nutana Pioneer Cemetery in 1884, five years before it became an official cemetery for the city. The last person was buried there in 1948.

Over the 20th century, there was a series of “slumping episodes,” which forced city workers to move some gravesites in the 1930s.

The non-invasive techniques, which won’t disturb the ground or cause any damage, will do a lot more than teach Clark’s students how to use these new techniques.

“(It will) also to help the city out,” Clark said. “We know that there’s a number of unmarked graves out here, so we’re able to identify where they are and map them for the city.”

Ground-penetrating radar uses a small machine that measures soil density difference. The time it takes for the radar beam’s signal to return to the device depends on how dense the soil is.

If the soil is softer, Clarks said that means a burial shaft may have been dug there.

The combination of techniques being used is making for a unique opportunity.

“I think that we’re one of the first to bring everything together and try to make sure the results are 100 per cent — and that we don’t have to dig to get 100 per cent certainty of where graves are,” Clark said.

Research like what’s happening at Nutana Pioneer Cemetery can also be used to assist searches across Canada of graves of Indigenous children who died while at residential school.

“This work is going to help guide the future work at residential schools,” Clark said.