In 2013, ArcTec's field crew undertook a program of survey to document chert quarries in the deep interior of southern Baffin Island.  To increase mobility, the crew relied on a helicopter, rather than the usual Twin Otter, to get around (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

The downside to helicopter travel is reduced space for personnel and cargo. (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

After loading all of our equipment, sometimes there's a little room leftover for an archaeologist or two. (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)


The interior of southern Baffin Island is dotted with lakes and rivers, swamps, and eskers.  All of these features make it difficult to land fixed-wing aircraft at many inland sites (Photo credit: Brooke Milne).

Helicopter pilots, on the other hand, enjoy showing off their precision landing capabilities. (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

One of the major goals of the 2013 field season was to test the capabilities of ArcTec's terrestrial LiDAR equipment for rapidly imaging sites under Arctic conditions (Photo credit: Brooke Milne). 

The Leica C10 ScanStation terrestrial LiDAR system uses laser light and detectors to collect spatial data which is stored as a point cloud.  This data can be rendered into images and videos of remote sites, and allows us to carry out spatial measurements of sites and features months after the short Arctic field season ends. (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

Another objective of the 2013 field season was to find and document quarries where people found chert to make stone tools.  The crew struck it big in 2013, finding two quarry sites.  LdDx-2, seen here from the air, is located on the southwest shore of Lake Amadjuak (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

At LdDx-2, chert is available as a component of limestone boulders on the site's surface.  As these boulders weather away, the chert nodules within are exposed, and can be collected with little effort. (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

Samples of this chert are collected for geochemical analysis as a part of the Southern Baffin Island Chert Provenance Project. By chemically 'fingerprinting' the chert, we hope to trace tools back to the quarries they came from, which will allow us to reconstruct aspects of past human mobility on Baffin Island (Photo credit: Mostafa Fayek).

Tent rings at LdDx-2 tell us that it was a site where people camped in addition to picking up chert (Photo credit: Brooke Milne).

The second quarry site documented in 2013, LbDt-1, is located on the Banks of the Hone River, about 100km WNW of Iqaluit (Photo credit: Mostafa Fayek)

As at LdDx-1, chert is available at LbDt-1 as a component of weathering boulders.  (Photo credit: Mostafa Fayek)

Chert is also available as a component of chert/limestone strata outcropping at LbDt-1 (Photo credit: Mostafa Fayek)

Massive accumulations of debitage - a byproduct of making chipped stone tools - attest to intensive human exploitation of chert available at LbDt-1 (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

Needless to say, the crew was delighted with this find!  Here, project geologist Dr. Mostafa Fayek and PhD candidate David Landry attempt to take it all in (Photo credit: Brooke Milne)

At LbDt-1, archaeological features directly on the bank of the Hone River are threatened by erosion.  This will be carefully monitored during future field seasons.