Hello and welcome to The Ordinary Centuries. I am Daniel Fortier, I spent ten years as a museum conservator, and I believe you learn more about the past from a worn spoon than from a crown. Each episode we start with one object and work outward to a whole life. Today the object is a pair of snowshoes. In 1694 a fur trader died in Montreal, and the notary listed everything he owned, from his house to his snowshoes. From that list we can rebuild his winter: a house heated with wood alone at minus thirty, meals of salt pork and dried peas and eels, credit from the merchant that had to be repaid in furs by spring, and the Indigenous craftspeople who made the snowshoes and whose names the inventory never gives. We also ask what it leaves out. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.