Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

It’s entirely possible that an early work by the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg will screen on Wednesday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. With the 2013 Student Film Showcase featuring the best from post-secondary schools around the country and the Next Wave Presents: Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase kicking off the evening with Toronto-area high-school students’ films, the night will be a coming-out party for a new crop of talent. Judging by the polished creativity of some of the entries, it’s safe to say that young people are more prepared than ever to start telling stories on film from an early age.

Mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers! Prehistoric Toronto looks back—wayyyyyy back—and explores the terrain that is now Toronto, as it developed through the ages.

The blue border shows the outline of the lakes today. The colour shapes with the wavy lines show the glacial lakes as they were 12,000 years ago.

For 100 years, Casa Loma has sat just a short, steep ridge away from the intersection of Spadina and Davenport roads, and gazed out over downtown Toronto. But, at one time, the view looking south from what is now the castle grounds would have been all water as far as the eye could see; in the very late Pleistocene epoch, Davenport was the beach above vast Lake Iroquois.

“I think a lot of people go up and down that ridge every day and don’t even give much thought to it,” says Rob MacDonald of heritage conservation consultants Archaeological Services Inc. “But that was [a] shoreline 12,500 years ago.”

Some 8,000 years before that, a massive glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of Canada, and had managed to extend as far as present-day Ohio at the tail end of its slow creep south. Then it began to melt and retreat, and, eventually, huge basins in the Great Lakes region, formed by previous glaciers and further gouged out under the movement of the Laurentide, would fill with meltwater.

An early version of Lake Erie appeared. Further west, the lakes we now call Michigan and Huron made up the bulk of glacial Lake Algonquin. Lake Iroquois formed in the basin of today’s Lake Ontario; it was bounded by ice to the northeast and drained through New York state’s Mohawk River.

The glacier continued to recede.

By about 12,000 years ago, the ice over the St. Lawrence River had disappeared. Lake Iroquois, finding this new, lower outlet, drained quickly and dramatically to as much as 85 metres below present-day water levels; an ancient shoreline now found at the bottom of Lake Ontario is evidence of this.

This smaller lake would not last long, either. After millennia beneath a heavy glacier more than a kilometre thick, Toronto was going through a process called isostatic rebound.

“Isostatic rebound is kind of like memory foam,” MacDonald explains. “If you push down on a bed that has a memory foam top on it, and take your hand away, you can still see the impression of your hand, but it’ll gradually come back up. So, the tectonic plates of the Earth are similar to that in some respect, in that if there’s a great weight added to them they will be depressed and then, gradually, over time, rise back up.”

This rebound from beneath the glacier—which is still slowly ongoing today—did not happen evenly. With land rising faster near early Lake Ontario’s northeastern outlet than it did in the south and the west, drainage along the St. Lawrence slowed. Water in the lake began to rise once more, reaching its current level some 4,500 years ago.

Of course, Laurentide ice did more than just temporarily create a giant lake. Much of Toronto’s present geography has been formed by the city’s history of repeated glaciation.

“If you strip up all the glacial sediment and just looked at the bare bedrock in southern Ontario, you’d see a landscape that’s similar, but in some ways different than what you see on the surface,” MacDonald says. “Most of the landforms [here] are of glacial origin.”

The Scarborough Bluffs, for instance, are an erosional feature representing a section of Lake Iroquois shoreline. High Park’s Grenadier Pond—and other lagoons and estuaries at the mouths of Toronto’s rivers—formed when isostatic rebound caused lake tributaries to back up. And sediments being pulled laterally across the north shore of the lake by a current were deposited near the mouth of the Don River, forming a long, sandy spit that would eventually be the Toronto Islands.

Amid all of this geographical formation, life in Toronto forged ahead. Spruce, birch, poplar, and alder trees populated mixed post-glacial forests. Humans had already crossed over the Bering land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, and would soon be in Toronto.

Just before they arrived, an extinct deer about which we know almost nothing was making its living in this city’s west end. And then one springtime day, that animal lay down and died. Some 11,300 years later, after an unsuspecting TTC worker discovered a fragment of its fossilized remains, it would come to be known as Torontoceros.

A miniature pipe, found in a sweat lodge and shown in situ, that was likely used to promote health.
Although the village’s name is lost to even the descendants of the Huron-Wendat—now located in Wendake, near Quebec City—the Alexandra Site was once a booming community of eight hundred to one thousand people, one of the twenty-five or so villages scattered north of Lake Ontario that comprised the Huron-Wendat nation. Early versions of Iroquoian settlements existed in the Toronto region from about one thousand one hundred years ago, but their nature and orientation evolved as the group’s cultural practices changed. Hunting, fishing, and gathering were always important—as evidenced by the remains of deer, lake trout, and wild berries found at the Alexandra Site—but, by the fourteenth century, a growing reliance on horticulture meant that settlements became larger and more permanent.
The Alexandra Site village, as was common, was located on a small ridge overlooking a waterway—the now-diverted Highland Creek—that provided transportation and fishing and was surrounded by cultivated fields. Unlike some other villages, there were no palisades, suggesting that it probably wasn’t threatened with extensive conflict. The various Iroquoian and other Aboriginal communities demonstrated a high level of interaction and appear to have shared ideas and similar cultural practices.
Beginning in the Early and Middle Woodland periods (1,000 B.C. to A.D. 600), the Huron-Wendat’s advantageous geographic position allowed them to become increasingly involved in extensive trading from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay, the Saguenay, and beyond. At the Alexandra Site, beads made of sea shells from the eastern seaboard illustrate just how far the Huron-Wendat trading network stretched. Much later, in the early 1600s, these established trade networks incorporated white newcomers, and the Huron-Wendat became indispensable middlemen in the French fur trade.

Artist’s depiction of an Iroquoian village. The Alexandra Site, however, did not have palisades.
Sixteen longhouses were unearthed at the Alexandra Site. The centre of these windowless structures, which housed extended families, was used for cooking and living, while walls were lined with raised bunks for sleeping. As the photograph illustrates, archaeologists could mark the exact outlines of longhouses because the poles that were bent to create the structure’s frame—and were then covered in saplings and bark—left residual organic stains in the soil. At the Alexandra Site, the longhouses ranged in size from only 5 metres long to more than 70 metres long. Longhouses were expanded or contracted or reconstructed numerous times, and additional longhouses were constructed to meet the evolving needs of the community.
One of the unusual features of the Alexandra Site, according to Archaeological Services Inc., is its large number of sweat lodges. Entered by a ramp leading into a large pit dug into the earth, a sweat lodge would be covered in an above-ground sapling and bark structure. Located throughout the village, these sweat lodges were warmed with steam from pouring water over heated rocks. They were used as social venues or for ritual purposes, likely for communicating with the spirit world. At the Alexandra Site, some of the sweat lodges had multiple entrances—indicating that they were shared by two households—and one even still had a woven mat on the floor.
The Alexandra Site also illustrates the importance of agriculture in the lives of the Huron-Wendat. Over the course of the Transitional Woodland Period (A.D. 600 to A.D. 900), the introduction of corn, beans, and squash to Ontario from the south instigated a massive cultural shift. Rather than depending upon naturally occurring resources for subsistence, the Huron-Wendat came to rely on food production. Becoming a fully developed horticultural society meant sacrificing group mobility, and it resulted in larger and more permanent settlements, such as the Alexandra Site village. Crops of corn, beans, squash, sunflower, and tobacco ensured prosperity for the Huron-Wendat and reinforced their role as traders.
The Huron-Wendat would have customarily worked the surrounding fields until the nutrients of the land were exhausted. Then, the community could reuse the village’s construction materials for firewood and move to a new site. The surrounding forest would reclaim the abandoned village, and nutrients would be naturally restored to the meadowlands. Typically, a village lasted for ten to twenty years. The Alexandra Site, on the other hand, was either used for a number of decades or occupied during several separate periods over the course of forty years.

Projectile Point Plate.
Eventually, during the Late Iroquoian period (A.D. 1400 to A.D. 1650), the Huron-Wendat who inhabited the Alexandra Site and others immediately surrounding Toronto relocated further north towards Georgian Bay. Although uncertainty surrounding the exact reasons for the move has long fuelled debate among historians and archaeologists, it was likely a combination of environmental and political factors. On one hand, the arable soil and opportunities for fish and game near Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe would’ve been attractive. On the other, an evolving social structure resulted in these regional populations becoming politically allied in the Huron Confederacy, in part to defend themselves against the incursion of the Five Nations Confederacy.
War and devastating epidemics drove the Huron-Wendat to disperse—some to Quebec, others to the American Midwest—in about 1650. Their departure to far flung locations makes their place in the Toronto region’s history easy to overlook. Yet, remarkable continuity existed between how the original Aboriginal inhabitants and the European settlers who followed used the land. “It’s not two different cities,” Ron Williamson, the president of Archaeological Services Inc., told Toronto Life for an October 2008 profile. Yonge Street, he continued, is just a “colonial incarnation of an ancient trail.” In this way, the earliest Aboriginal inhabitants have influenced the way the modern city has taken shape.
All images and photos courtesy of Archaeological Services Inc.