We had, and still have, difficulty finding names for the elements and characteristics of this landscape. The human response to this landscape is so new and ill-defined and complex that our writers come back, uneasily but compulsively, to landscape writing. Like the homesteaders before us, we are compelled to adjust and invent, to remember and forget. It is a kind of archaeology that makes this place, with all its implications, available to us for literary purposes. Archaeology allows the fragmentary nature of the story, against the coerced unity of traditional history.
Archaeology allows for discontinuity.
It allows for layering. It allows for imaginative speculation. I am aware that it is the great French historian Michel Foucault who has formalized our understanding of the appropriateness of the archaeological method. For me, one of those deposits turned out to be an old seed catalogue. I found a 1917 catalogue in the Glenbow archives in 1975.