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November/December 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Wildlife stories Feature: Stealing the scene Feature: Lake Winnipeg Feature: Alberta’s Cypress Hills The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

In his T-shirt and muddy jeans, University of Calgary archaeologist Gerry Oetelaar does not look equipped for time travel. Yet there he stands, in a small, leafy clearing just east of the resort town of Elkwater in Alberta’s Cypress Hills, poised to take a flying leap into the past.

At his feet lies a sheer-sided rectangular hole big enough to swallow a bungalow. It is known as the Stampede Site, so called because the local rodeo grounds are nearby. It measures eight metres wide by nine metres long by a full six metres deep. Oetelaar and his students dug it, one trowelful at a time, over six summers from 2000 to 2005. As a result of their meticulous exertions, he and his team have recovered nearly a million artifacts, including piles of bones and stone chips and a few spectacular treasures, and have documented the repeated presence of people in this place over hundreds of generations.

Now, on a moody day in June, Oetelaar has been joined by a summer-school class studying Blackfoot culture at the University of Lethbridge that is participating in an interpretative event called "History in the Hills." A mixed group of students, instructors and elders, they cluster along one end of the crater, leaning over a barrier of yellow rope, eager to see where this journey into the past will take them.

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