The Murphy site is located just northwest of the modern town of Glencoe, Ontario in a ploughed field and was discovered in the 1960's by D. Brian Deller and Reynold Welke. Excavations were carried out as part of a larger project designed to investigate small Paleo-Indian sites in 1990, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded to Ellis and Deller and supplementary funding from Northeastern Archaeological Associates. Dr. Lawrence Jackson was in charge of the excavations at the site and responsible for the analyses of the recovered assemblages.

A major problem encountered at the site was its almost solid clay matrix which limited the amount which could be excavated. However, continued tilling of the site surface and surface collection, as well as the excavated material provides some details about the site occupation. The site consists of at least three small concentations of artifactual material. One of these areas, called the east knoll yielded the bulk of the artifactual material which consisted of a wide range of tool forms including knives, side scrapers, denticulates or serrated edge flakes, wedges and a trianguloid end scraper. Another area, called the west knoll, produced mainly flaking debris from making bifacial tools including channel flakes derived in fluting points. The separation of a point making area from an area of other activities is a pattern noted at other sites such as Culloden Acres. Although no fluted point tips were recovered from the site, the large size of the channel flakes suggests the points produced were of the Gainey style which is believed to represent the earliest fluted point style in Ontario and adjacent areas. Most of the Paleo-Indian artifacts from Murphy are made on Fossil Hill formation cherts from the Collingwood area some 225 km to the northeast.

C. J. Ellis, D. B. Deller and L. J. Jackson - 1992 - Investigations at Small, Interior, Early Paleo-Indian Sites in Southwestern Ontario. Annual Archaeological Report for Ontario for 1991, New Series 2:92-96.

L. J. Jackson - 1996 - Murphy: An Early Palaeo-Indian Gainey Phase Site in Southwestern Ontario. Ontario Archaeology 62:10-38.

Other References

C. J. Ellis, D. B. Deller (with contributions by L. J. Jackson, B. Warner and P. Karrow) - 1991 - Investigations at Small Early Paleo-Indian Sites in Southwestern Ontario, 1990: Culloden Acres, Bolton and Murphy. Ontario Archaeological Licence report on file, Licences #90-057, 90-058, 90-086. Ontario Ministry of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation, Toronto, Ontario.