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Paper Short Abstract:

Engaging with the prehistoric sands and shorelines of the Champlain Sea, this paper examines how sand (re)emerges to continually interact with the present. Tracing a variety of human practices as they relate to sand, this paper takes sand as a kind of anachronistic archive.

Paper Abstract:

At the end of the last ice age, that is about 13,000 years ago, the glaciers retreated from what is now Eastern Ontario. As they left, they gouged and scraped the landscape, leaving a depression in which the Champlain Sea persisted for about 3,000 years. Today, its remnants are the historic St.Lawrence River, the inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. Though the water has retreated, the history of the sea remains in fossils, clay soils, and sand. In this paper, I ‘unmake’ the concept of a coastal shore by tracing how prehistoric sands inflect contemporary inland life, (re)appearing across the landscape as humans terraform the environment. As early settlers farmed the land and depleted soils, the sand come to the surface, defying any sense that sediment remains buried or in order. The past, geologic and otherwise, does not necessarily stay buried but continually interacts with the present. Today, the sands of the Champlain Sea appear in numerous situations: buried below fertile agricultural soils; blowing across wastelands; extracted as a commodity; and made subject to erosion control measures in community forests. In each, history is revealed in different configurations. The earth is indeed a kind of archive (Ogden, 2021), but when read through sands, this paper will argue it is perhaps an anachronistic one. Shores are undone with time, and yet (re)emerge through shifting ecological and social relations. And there forever remains the possibility that the sea will come back in a flood.