Archaeological Perspectives on the French in the New World [1 ed.] 9780813052694

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Archaeological Perspectives on the French in the New World

University Press of Florida Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida, Sarasota University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

Archaeological Perspectives on the French in the New World

Edited by Elizabeth M. Scott

University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

Copyright 2017 by Elizabeth M. Scott All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book may be available in an electronic edition. 22 21 20 19 18 17

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Scott, Elizabeth M., editor. Title: Archaeological perspectives on the French in the New World / edited by Elizabeth M. Scott. Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016055639 | ISBN 9780813054391 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: French—North America—Antiquities. | Archaeology and history—North America. | French—North America—History. Classification: LCC E29.F8 A73 2017 | DDC 973.2/6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055639 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://upress.ufl.edu

Contents

List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Acknowledgments xi 1. An Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities in the Americas 1 Elizabeth M. Scott

2. Archaeological Dimensions of the Acadian Diaspora 32 Steven R. Pendery

3. “They Are Fit to Eat the Divel and Smoak His Mother”: Labor, Leisure, Tobacco Pipes, and Smoking Customs among French Canadian Voyageurs during the Fur Trade Era 58 Rob Mann

4. Food and Furs at French Fort St. Joseph 83 Michael S. Nassaney and Terrance J. Martin

5. Landscapes of Forgetting and the Materiality of Enslavement: Using Class, Ethnicity, and Gender to Search for the Invisible on a Postcolonial French House Lot in the Illinois Country 112 Erin N. Whitson

6. Access to First-Choice Foods and Settlement Failure at French Azilum 136 Maureen Costura

7. Pots Sauvage: Plantation Pottery Traditions of Northwest Louisiana at the End of the Eighteenth Century 154 David W. Morgan and Kevin C. MacDonald

8. Identity and Cultural Interaction in French Guiana during the Eighteenth Century: The Case of the Storehouse at Habitation Loyola 185 Antoine Loyer Rousselle and Réginald Auger

9. Sugar Plantations in the French West Indies: Archaeological Perspectives from Guadeloupe and Martinique 218 Kenneth G. Kelly

10. Uncovering the French on St. Croix: Stories of Seventeenth-Century Settlement and Abandonment on the Caribbean Frontier 240 Meredith D. Hardy

Glossary of French Terms 271 List of Contributors 275 Index 277

Figures

2.1. Initial deportations from Acadia in 1755 33 2.2. The Acadian diaspora, 1755–1785 34 2.3. “Acadian ditch” shown in 1903 map of Kingston, Massachusetts 41 2.4. View of the encampment at Sinnamary by Jean-Baptiste Tugny, 1767 43 2.5. Habitations between the Paracou River and Sinnamary, French Guiana, possibly 1764 45 2.6. Areas of Acadian settlement in Louisiana 48 3.1. The Voyageurs by Arthur Heming, ca. 1919 64 3.2. Ein Canadischer Bauer by Captain Friedrich Konstantin von Germann, 1778 66 3.3. Canoe manned by voyageurs passing a waterfall by Frances Anne Hopkins, 1869 67 3.4. Hudson’s Bay Company Men in an Express Canoe by Peter Rindisbacher, 1825 68 3.5. Captain By-Gosh by George Winter, 1839 68 3.6. White clay pipes recovered from the Savanna Portage 73 4.1. Map of the western Great Lakes region 84 4.2. Adaptation of a Thomas Hutchins map (1778) showing Fort St. Joseph and a Potawatomi village 87 4.3. Remains of a smudge pit from Fort St. Joseph 92 4.4. Splayed musket barrel and iron scraps from Fort St. Joseph 93 5.1. Map of French territory in North America 113 5.2. Location of excavation of the outbuilding at the Janis house 114 5.3. Map of Missouri showing the Ste. Genevieve area 116 5.4. Janis-Ziegler house, Ste. Genevieve 117 5.5. Post molds from the outbuilding (Feature 7) 125

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6.1. Map of Pennsylvania showing Bradford County 137 6.2. French Azilum (1794), by the Comte de Maulevrier 138 6.3. Laporte House, ca. 1930 139 7.1. Location of Coincoin Plantation in Louisiana 155 7.2. Archaeological plan map showing dwelling remains and midden 161 7.3. Rim Classes A–F 168 7.4. Plot of 479 colonoware sherd thicknesses 170 7.5. Mean sherd thickness of select temper types 174 8.1. Location of Loyola and the island of Cayenne in French Guiana 186 8.2. Eighteenth-century view of the habitation Loyola 187 8.3. Sketch map of the residential sector of Loyola 196 8.4. Aerial view of the storehouse of Loyola, 2012 197 8.5. Material culture recovered from the south ditch of the storehouse 200 8.6. Material culture recovered inside the storehouse 202 8.7. African American pipes found during excavation of the storehouse 205 9.1. Map showing islands of the French West Indies 219 9.2. Map of Guadeloupe showing Habitation La Mahaudière and Habitation Grande Pointe 224 9.3. Map of Martinique showing Habitation Crève Cœur 224 9.4. Modern house of wattled construction, Martinique 227 9.5. Map of Crève Cœur village excavations 228 9.6. Barracks-style laborer housing, Trois-Ilets, Martinique 230 10.1. Map showing location of St. Croix 242 10.2. Blondel map (1667) of St. Croix 247 10.3. Lapoint map (1671) of St. Croix 250 10.4. Blondel map overlaying Oxholm (1799) 260 10.5. Lapoint map (1671) overlaying orthoimagery 261 10.6. Map showing the locations of habitations from both the 1667 and 1671 maps over the Laurie and Whittle map (1804) 262

Tables

2.1. Chronology of Acadian History 33 4.1. White-tailed Deer Skeletal Remains (NISP) from the Fort St. Joseph and Fort Ouiatenon Sites 101 5.1. Economic Scales for Ceramic Vessels from the Janis Occupation of the Site (1790–1833) 123 7.1. Summary of Twenty-Four Colonoware Rim Data 167 7.2. Decorated Types at the Coincoin Plantation 171 8.1. Decorated Earthenware Related to Foodways, Found during the Excavations of the Storehouse 201

Acknowledgments

I want to express my greatest thanks to the authors who contributed to this volume. Each of them approached the endeavor with the utmost professionalism, responding thoughtfully to my comments and those of the reviewers as well as adhering to several time constraints and deadlines. Meredith Babb, director of the University Press of Florida (UPF), was supportive every step of the way and was a joy to work with. She expressed interest in this group of papers even before the initial symposium took place at the 2014 Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Québec City, and her enthusiasm never wavered. Her staff at UPF provided excellent guidance through the publication process; I thank Robert Burchfield especially for his thoughtful and thorough copyediting. I want to thank Gregory Waselkov and an anonymous external reviewer for the time they took to provide very helpful comments; the volume is much better because of their constructive suggestions. Finally, I thank my husband, Donald Heldman, for his constant support, excellent counsel, and unfailing good humor.

1 An Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities in the Americas Elizabeth M. Scott

For many who live in the United States, the importance of the French colonial past to their sense of cultural identity goes largely unacknowledged and certainly unappreciated. Anglo-centric histories pervade the national consciousness, incorporating other Euro-American, Native American, and African pasts only as exotic sidebars. Even for Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, where language, food, music, religion, and kinship make visible the cultural traditions of a vibrant French heritage, what predominates in the national narrative are the myths and stereotypes (Dawdy and Weyhing 2008; Rees 2008). In Canada and the circum-Caribbean, with large, recognizable communities of ethnic French, African-French, and Métis (Native American and French heritage) descendants, that colonial past is well known and very much alive in the present. Since the end of the Seven Years War, the Anglo-dominated Canadian government has attempted to incorporate Québecois and Anglo-Canadian concerns, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully. However, in Canada’s national narrative, an idealized Old World French colonial past essentially ignores the importance of the post-Conquest French population to Canada’s history (Auger and Moss 2001). French Guiana and the French West Indies have remained part of France, first as colonies and then as overseas departments. However, in the French circum-Caribbean, the traumatic histories of Native depopulation and plantation slavery have hindered the expression of more truthful and inclusive national narratives (see Kelly, this volume). Both Canada and the French circum-Caribbean are dealing today with divisions and conflicts that have their roots in the French colonial past.

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Perhaps surprisingly, so is the United States. In addition to initial French conquest and displacement of Native peoples, the French enslavement of both Native Americans and Africans began a process that continued for more than 200 years. After the Seven Years War, what had been French colonial communities in North America underwent colonization by Spain and Britain and later by the early American republic. Multiple waves of invasion, resistance, and accommodation occurred in a large swath of the interior United States, creating increasingly heterogeneous societies and class, ethnic, and racial tensions with which the United States still grapples today. The authors in this volume are concerned with French-speaking communities in the New World past, whether they existed under French, British, Spanish, or American political regimes. Some authors focus more on ethnic French members of the community, others on African Americans, and still others on Native Americans. Even after they no longer had access to goods made in France, heterogeneous communities existed in these places for generations, were culturally French and French American, and clearly distinguished themselves from other communities that followed different cultural traditions. This collection reveals new understandings of communities of French heritage in the New World, drawing on archaeological and historical evidence from both colonial and post-Conquest settings. Prior to the individual chapters, this introduction provides historical and geographical background and situates the volume’s contributions in the context of previous archaeological research into the French in the New World (see overviews and collections by Kelly and Hardy 2011; Moss 2009; Moussette and Waselkov 2014; Scott 2008a; Walthall 1991; Walthall and Emerson 1992; Waselkov 1997, 2002).

Place and Space The New World colonies established by the French comprised a far-flung arc of settlement, from the northeastern tip of Labrador, to the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley, to the Caribbean and the north coast of South America. With the exception of the Caribbean plantation islands, the wide geographic breadth of French America was only thinly populated by Europeans, and yet that population enjoyed a remarkable degree

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 3

of cohesion, arguably more than did British America. The component that held this largely interior French colonial world together was river travel. French colonists on the mainland of North and South America settled nearly exclusively along waterways, maintaining frequent interaction between people in widely dispersed towns, villages, missions, and trading posts. Rivers and the Great Lakes were crucially important lines of communication, supply, and transportation, for people and for goods. Fur traders and voyageurs spent most of their lives moving along these waterways; settled farmers, plantation owners, and merchants depended on them to move goods and produce (Vidal 2005); families relied on them to bring letters, relatives, and any number of imported goods. While fewer in number than the British colonists, French settlers nonetheless made their presence felt on the landscape and on Native groups through a wide range of settlement types, economic and social networks, and successive generations of habitation. Settlement on the Landscape The French placed many of their settlements near those of Native groups, for many of the same reasons (arable land, proximity to water, key intersections of roads or paths), but also so that they might have easier access to furs, hides, and souls to convert, as well as easier control over colonized subjects (Zitomersky 1994). Archaeologists have investigated a variety of Native settlements occupied during the French colonial period, primarily towns and villages (Guevin 1984; Lennox and Fitzgerald 1990; Morse 1992; Pastore 1994; Trubowitz 1992) but also hunting camps (Walthall et al. 1992) and settlements near missions (Branstner 1992). Archaeologists and historians have revealed ethnic French settlement types that run the gamut from dispersed to highly concentrated, depending on the local economy and topography. Colonial towns and villages often had a grid pattern of streets, with houses fronting the streets and fenced or walled residential lots stretching behind them, reflecting town plans from France (Moussette and Waselkov 2014:270). The cities of Québec and Montréal saw the densest concentrations of people in French North America, and archaeologists have revealed a diverse set of contexts in which they lived: government officials’ residences (Auger et al. 2009; Goyette 2009), religious properties (Lalande 1998; Pothier and Simpson

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2001; Simoneau 2008a), and neighborhoods full of businesses and residences (Bain et al. 2009; Cloutier 1997, 2009; Desjardins and Duguay 1992; Ethnoscop 2003; L’Anglais 1994, 1998; Moss 1998). Agriculturally based settlements sometimes concentrated dwellings and public buildings in a village, with agricultural land divided into traditional French long lots outside or surrounding the village (Ekberg 1998; Mazrim 2011; Norris 1991). Individuals also established single-family farms, primarily along the St. Lawrence River, such as at Cap Tourmente (Guimont 1996) and Île aux Oies (Coté 2005; Moussette 2008, 2009a). In addition, farmsteads and plantations were established on long lots fronting rivers, with property stretching from the riverbank to the blufftop or interior forests. These ribbonlike or “strip” farms were frequently found in rural areas along the St. Lawrence and Detroit Rivers and in the western Great Lakes (Heldman 1991, 1999:306–307). In the lower Mississippi Valley, larger plantations, still linear in orientation, extended from the river’s edge to interior forests or swamps (Mann 2008a; Markell et al. 1999; Waselkov and Gums 2000:63–90). In both regions, the main residential dwelling was located near the river, the primary thoroughfare for goods, communication, and people. On the Gulf Coast, Caribbean islands, and the north coast of French Guiana, plantations were self-contained economic and residential systems, including a main house, slave quarters, agricultural outbuildings, fields, and often industrial buildings such as sugar refineries, cotton gins, and indigo processing facilities (Bain et al. 2011; Kelly 2008, 2011; Waselkov and Silvia 1995). Plantation economies also saw towns and cities develop, revealed in the neighborhoods and businesses excavated in New Orleans (Dawdy et al. 2002), in Mobile (Waselkov 2002), and in Basse-Terre on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe (Arcangeli 2015). Fur-trading posts and military forts, at times one and the same, were established at locations most conducive to trade with Native groups, for example, at the junction of water or land transportation routes or where Native groups were settled or traditionally gathered. Archaeologists have explored variation among household contexts within these trading posts and found evidence for socioeconomic, occupational, and ethnic differences (Heldman 1973; Heldman and Grange 1981; Lapointe 1985; Nassaney 2015; Nassaney et al. 2007; Scott 2001a; Somcynsky 1982; Waselkov 1984). The French constructed other forts primarily for military purposes,

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 5

and strategically located them to usurp and defend what they claimed as French colonial holdings, vis-à-vis other European and Native American groups. Examples include Fort Pentagoet (Faulkner and Faulkner 1987), Fortress Louisbourg (Fry 1984), Saint-Louis at Québec (Cloutier and L’Anglais 2009), Fort Chambly (Beaudet and Cloutier 1989), Fort Niagara (Dunnigan and Scott 1991), and Fort de Chartres (Brown and Mazrim 2010; Jelks et al. 1989; Keene 1991). Colonists built other kinds of settlements for extracting resources, usually clustered near the resource itself and therefore somewhat removed from heavily populated areas. Individuals or small groups of voyageurs built single cabins in the forests for the winter, to trap animals themselves or obtain furs from Native groups (Birk 1991). An industrial village was established at Forges du Saint-Maurice, outside of Trois-Rivières, to mine and process iron ore (Beaudet 1979; Samson 1998). In the middle Mississippi Valley, a village grew up south of Ste. Genevieve along the banks of the Saline Creek, to extract salt from the springs there (Trimble et al. 1991). Hundreds of French colonists fished and processed cod, working year-round on seigneuries along Grand Pabos Bay on the Gaspé Peninsula (Nadon 2004) or on the coasts of Labrador (Auger et al. 1993) and Newfoundland (Turgeon 1998). French colonists and enslaved Native Americans and Africans extracted lead ore, often in shallow deposits, in a mining district in eastern Missouri, settling near the mines or along the water and wagon trails used to transport the lead (Schroeder 2002). Coarse earthenware pottery workshops were concentrated in the St. Lawrence River valley of southern Québec, tied to the location of suitable clay deposits (Monette et al. 2007). Mission settlements, present in all parts of the French colonial empire, were located near existing Native towns and villages and often preceded the forts and towns of ethnic French colonists (Zitomersky 1994). Frequently, these missions were well delineated spatially so that clergy, soldiers, Native residents, and enslaved Africans lived and worked in separate, controlled spaces (Brown 1978; Kidd 1949; Le Roux et al. 2009; Walthall and Benchley 1987). In French towns and villages, church property was clearly demarcated, and parish priests usually lived in households within that property (Gums and Witty 2000).

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Economic and Social Ties Economic and social networks also varied considerably throughout the French colonies. From the beginning, ethnic French colonists depended on Native peoples for furs and hides, and archaeologists have long been interested in the trade and interdependency that developed (Brown 1992; Martin 1991; Moussette 2009b; Nassaney 2008; Trigger 1986). Often economic and social networks were one and the same, such as the kinship networks established by marriages between Native women and French traders and voyageurs, through which both societies participated in the fur trade (Brown 1980; Peterson 1985; Van Kirk 1983). Besides agricultural work on plantations (e.g., Mann 2008a; Markell et al. 1999), enslaved Africans and Native Americans labored in many different contexts, such as shipbuilding and shipping, mining, salt production, fur trading and trapping, construction and carpentry, craft production, and service in household, office, and religious settings. Throughout Canada and Upper and Lower Louisiana, merchants and traders depended on French, Métis, and Native men to provide the water transportation and communication that supported the entire economic system, via canoes, pirogues, and other watercraft (St-Onge 2013). Such intensive interaction between ethnic French, Native Americans, and African Americans fostered exchange of information, customs, and ideas (Silvia 2002; Turgeon 1996; Waselkov 1992), seen archaeologically, for example, in foodways (Carlson 2012; Dawdy 2010; Martin 2008; Pavao-Zuckerman 2007; Reitz and Waselkov 2015; Scott and Dawdy 2011) and technology (Anderson 1994; Ehrhardt 2005; Fitzgerald 1988; Galloway 1984; Mann 2015; Morgan and MacDonald 2011). French settlers also depended on other ethnic French men and women of different economic classes for labor and employment. Even in small villages, where it could be argued that most settlers enjoyed a middling degree of wealth, people made distinctions among themselves in house construction, material possessions, and food and drink, borne out in numerous excavations of French households (e.g., Archéotec 2003; Cloutier 2004; Crépeau and Christianson 1995; Evans 2001; Gums 2002; Mann 2010; Mazrim 2011). Social networks among urban, military, and plantation elites, especially networks maintained through marriage, functioned to keep wealth and power segregated from the majority of colonists, even as colonial regimes ended or changed (Gitlin 2010; Reda 2013).

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 7

Heterogeneity and Interdependence Although relatively homogeneous in terms of religion (dominated by Catholicism), as revealed in the many missions and churches that have been excavated, as well as the numerous religious medals, rosaries, and crucifixes that have been recovered (e.g., Gums et al. 1991; Rinehart 1990), French colonial communities were heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity, class, and gender. Different regions of the New World were colonized by ethnic French settlers through a variety of means: private individuals or companies, religious orders, royal colonial administrators, and military installations. Each of these encouraged or required settlers to emigrate from France; settlers came from different regions in France and different economic classes, with different reasons for leaving France (Brasseaux 2005:1–84). While official French colonies in the New World were Catholic, groups of French Protestants, or Huguenots, also settled throughout the Americas. Fleeing religious persecution in France, especially after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, they established small communities in British (Protestant) colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America and in the Caribbean. Archaeological excavations show that Huguenots built their houses in traditional French poteaux-en-terre (posts-inground) style; indeed, this was one of the few material indicators of an ethnic French household in a British colony (Steen 2002). The ethnic heterogeneity of French colonial society is often emphasized by scholars, especially when contrasting French and Anglo-American colonies, and this is usually attributed to a greater willingness by the French to marry or form lasting unions with Native Americans and with free and enslaved Africans. However, this was not the case throughout the French colonies, and where it was the case, economic and other factors often had much to do with intermarriage as well. To a certain degree, the willingness to mix with those who were not French resulted from the importance the French government initially placed on religious and civil francisation (Frenchification) of Native Americans as a necessary part of the colonization process (Belmessous 2005). After learning how to become culturally “French,” Native people could be converted to Christian souls. Once Native people had become French and Catholic, they were acceptable as marriage partners and godparents for ethnic French settlers, and indeed, early in the colonization process,

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this was seen as a way to provide the necessary numbers of settlers so that the colonies could succeed (Belmessous 2005; White 2012:112–142). By the eighteenth century, government officials and religious leaders realized that the assimilation of Native peoples into French culture (francisation) had not succeeded in the colonies. They blamed this not on a failing of the policy of francisation but on a failing of Native peoples themselves; officials’ language began to reflect racial categories that confounded biological and social characteristics and stigmatized “mixed” descendants (Aubert 2004; Belmessous 2005). In the general sense, then, it was a brand of Eurocentrism particular to the French that allowed the incorporation of non-Europeans into their colonial society in ways distinct from British or Spanish colonial societies. In the particular sense, it was experience through time with its New World colonies, including the increase in the African and Native slave trades, that precipitated changes in official French policies toward a more rigid racial hierarchy (Aubert 2004; Belmessous 2005; Rushforth 2003). Against this general framework of racialization, however, people lived their daily lives in a multitude of realities. Various groups in the government, church, and upper classes were at odds about the wisdom of mixing with non-French peoples; those in favor cited the reasons mentioned earlier, while those opposed feared (often correctly) that this “mixing” would “Nativize” French people more than it would “Frenchify” Native people (White 2012). The chapters in this volume by Michael Nassaney and Terrance Martin and by Antoine Loyer Rousselle and Réginald Auger reveal a great degree of interdependence between French colonists and Native groups. Nassaney and Martin show that fur traders and their families at Fort St. Joseph relied on Native peoples, or at least their strategies, to obtain food resources and to process furs and hides. Loyer Rousselle and Auger conclude that the Jesuits and ethnic French indentured servants at the habitation (plantation) Loyola in Guyane (French Guiana) depended greatly on the local Native groups for food, material culture, and knowledge of the local geography. In both cases, Native peoples engaged in trading food, furs, or other items of Native manufacture for imported European goods such as metal tools, weapons, ceramic and glass vessels, metal items of adornment, and glass beads. Colonial legal codes and policies at first allowed, then banned marriage between French settlers and Native people. However, proximity to the governmental and church offices that enforced these policies and the

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 9

particular needs of different types of settlements had much to do with the degree to which the laws were followed. Settlements that were dependent on the fur trade were, of necessity, dependent on Native peoples for access to furs and for labor, and marriage and kinship networks were sought out by both French and Native groups; French men often became “Nativized,” and Métis society had its beginnings in these networks (Peterson and Brown 1985; Sleeper-Smith 2001). Fur-trading communities also tended to be the farthest from governmental and religious enforcement in Québec and New Orleans. French agriculturally based settlements in the interior of North America, however, were often modeled after French villages and towns; they had significantly less dependence on Native peoples for their livelihood, and intermarriage occurred less frequently there. When it did occur, Native women tended to become “Frenchified,” fulfilling traditional French women’s roles in family and society (Morrissey 2013; White 2012). The French enslaved both Native peoples and Africans, but the numbers of Africans far exceeded Native Americans (Geggus 2001; Hall 1992). By the eighteenth century, French officials increasingly participated in the Indian slave trade or “captive” trade, strengthening French alliances with Native groups by conveying slaves/prisoners from one group to another; ethnic French settlers increased their ownership of enslaved Indians as well (Rushforth 2003). How did Africans fit into this general picture of French racialization and “mixing,” as part of colonial practice in the New World? Africans by the tens of thousands were forcibly brought to the Americas as part of the French colonization process; in those colonies dependent on agriculture, the Caribbean islands, French Guiana, and Lower and Upper Louisiana, the labor of enslaved Africans provided the basis for the entire society (Geggus 2001) and, arguably, underwrote most of broader French colonial society as well. We know relatively little about the degree to which enslaved Africans interacted with Native peoples, but in their contribution to this volume, David Morgan and Kevin MacDonald use ceramic evidence from plantation slave quarters to reveal close relations between the two groups. Loyer Rousselle and Auger (this volume) likewise note the frequent interaction between Jesuits, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans in plantation society in French Guiana. The Code Noir, or Black Code, specified the obligations that the French government required of slaveholders; a 1685 version applied to the French

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Caribbean and a 1724 version applied to French Louisiana (Aubert 2004). For example, French slaveholders in mainland North America were required to consider conversion to Catholicism to be part and parcel of their legal responsibilities toward enslaved Africans; that they did so is indicated by church baptismal, marriage, and burial records. However, the degree to which the Code Noir was followed varied tremendously within the colonies (Aubert 2004; Matthews 2001; Vidal 2003). Historical archaeologists have begun to shed light on the daily lives of enslaved individuals in French colonial settings (Gibson 2009; Kelly 2011; Mann 2010; Markell et al. 1999; Matthews 1999; Morgan and MacDonald 2011; Scott 2001b; Waselkov and Gums 2000), but this remains one of the least understood aspects of French America. We need much more archaeological research into French systems of slavery in various parts of the New World. Several of the contributors to this volume provide this kind of research, discussing enslaved Africans in French or French-descended communities, how they interacted with slaveholders, and how they were included (or not) in French colonial society (see chapters by Whitson, Morgan and MacDonald, Loyer Rousselle and Auger, Kelly, and Hardy). Just as government officials had outlawed French and Indian relationships, the French government in the 1724 Louisiana Code Noir prohibited marriage or sexual relationships between ethnic French and Africans; although not prohibited in the 1685 Caribbean Code Noir, government officials strongly discouraged it there (Aubert 2004; White 2012:142). By the eighteenth century, also as with French-Indian interactions, the language used by government officials about French-African relationships took on a quasi-biological racial lexicon (Aubert 2004; Belmessous 2005). And yet the presence of people of mixed heritage in the colonies belies sexual, and sometimes cultural, unions and interaction, regardless of the prohibitions. These were by no means all consensual, particularly when the women were enslaved Native Americans or Africans (Spear 2009). Métis and gens de couleur libre (free people of color) occupied liminal positions, and yet there was a wide range of variation within these groups as well (e.g., Gehman 2000; St-Onge 2004). Some Métis individuals were raised as and self-identified as French, some as Native American, and others as members of both cultures. Free people of color occupied the same economic positions as Europeans, from very poor to very wealthy (and slaveholding) (Gehman 1994; Spear 2009). Métis people lived throughout France’s New World colonies, although they formed a greater part

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 11

of the population in regions with the greatest dependence on Native groups: western New France and Louisiana. Free people of color, also, lived throughout the French colonies, but made up a far greater proportion of the population in regions with the greatest dependence on African slavery: Louisiana, the Caribbean, and French Guiana. “Creolization” is a term many scholars use, including some of the authors here, to describe the process of cultural give and take that occurred in New World colonial contexts, especially in areas where Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans lived in close proximity, such as Lower Louisiana, the Caribbean, and the north coast of South America. While many definitions of creolization exist (see, for example, the contributors to Dawdy 2000), all include an active engagement by people of different groups in retaining, adopting, changing, and rejecting various cultural practices and materials. It is critical to keep in mind, however, that creolization cannot be understood “outside of the various contexts within which it occurred” (Trouillot 2002:195). In this volume, the importance of context is clear in the contributions that address archaeological evidence for creolization: those about Fort St. Joseph (Nassaney and Martin), the Coincoin Plantation (Morgan and MacDonald), the Acadians in French Guiana (Pendery), and the habitation Loyola (Loyer Rousselle and Auger). A Continuity of Cultural Traditions European wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries impacted the colonies in the Americas just as they did the home countries. Sometimes this involved warfare being waged in the colonies; sometimes it involved only shortages of supplies caused by disruption to shipping or a lack of royal funds caused by siphoning them off to pay for a war. European wars also involved Native Americans in a complex network of alliances with European colonists and other Native groups. Peace treaty negotiations always included provisions for the disposition of the colonies of the defeated nation, to the benefit of the victor. New World colonial possessions were part of the much larger picture, centered at first on the Atlantic World but later becoming entirely global in its extent. Even during years of supposed peace, when warfare was not active, friction and animosity resulting from contested claims to land, resources, and affiliation with Native groups made for a less than peaceful coexistence

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among the colonies of different nations. During the eighteenth century, there were very few years during which French and British colonists, and their Native allies, were not engaged in battles of some sort with each other. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 ended the War of Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne’s War as it was known in the colonies (1702–1713), by which France lost Acadia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay region to Britain. Although Acadia had changed hands between France and Britain many times since the early seventeenth century, the Treaty of Utrecht began the final period of unrest that led to the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755 (see Pendery, this volume; Brasseaux 1987; Faragher 2005; Peyser 1997:36). The treaty also served as a wake-up call for France to strengthen its colonial arc of settlement by establishing or reestablishing posts and settlements in the western Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. From the 1710s through the 1730s, France and its Native allies battled with Britain and its Native allies in the Great Lakes and lower Mississippi Valley (Peyser 1997:14–15). The War of Austrian Succession, or King George’s War, also fought with Native allies, was carried out in the colonies between 1744 and 1748, but the peace was short-lived. British and French incursions into the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, especially the Ohio Valley, occurred with increasing frequency. When war again commenced in 1754 between Britain and France, in what was to become the Seven Years War, or French and Indian War, it was no surprise that it played out in the backcountry of the British colonies and along the entire arc of French settlement across North America, where it might be said that hostilities had never really ceased since 1713. While the defeat handed to France in 1763 had the greatest impact, resulting in the loss of nearly all of France’s New World colonial possessions, there had been a long history of disputes and battles over those colonies leading up to that defeat. In spite of the vicissitudes of population growth and productivity in the French colonies, and in spite of the changes in colonial rule brought about by various European wars, especially the Seven Years War, many French communities (former colonies) continued to exist in their same locations well into the nineteenth century. For the most part, the economic structures and labor systems that had operated under the French colonial regime continued to operate under the British and Spanish regimes after 1763. The British were completely dependent on French, Métis, and Native laborers to carry out the fur trade in Canada and the Mississippi Valley

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 13

and, indeed, could not have engaged in the fur trade without allowing the system developed by French and Native peoples to stay in place (Scott 2001a; Widder 2001, 2013). Rob Mann, in this volume, delineates how French and Métis voyageurs maintained control over their labor and time, especially after the British took control of the Canadian fur trade. In the formerly French colonies of the Mississippi Valley, long-lot agricultural practices and residence in towns remained in place, and were even adopted by British colonists who moved into the area (Ekberg 1985; Mazrim 2011). Erin Whitson (this volume) describes the archaeological evidence from a possible slave cabin that was on a French house lot in the town of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, between 1790 and 1833. Ethnic French planters and free people of color in Louisiana continued to own plantations and controlled vast amounts of agricultural production that was dependent on African enslaved labor, even as Anglo-American planters settled alongside them. The plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, owned and run by Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, a free woman of color, reveals the complexity of interactions that existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries between ethnic French, enslaved Africans, free people of color, and Native Americans (Morgan and MacDonald, this volume). One of the ways archaeologists are able to identify the ethnicity of people who lived on a site is through the country of origin for the material culture found there, something usually controlled by the ruling colonial power. However, the French who continued to reside in the former colonies no longer had unfettered access to material culture from France. After the 1759 defeat at Québec, the British in Canada imposed an embargo on ships from France, making it nearly impossible to obtain French goods. Both French and British residents were therefore dependent on British merchants and their goods. French residents of Québec lived side by side with their British conquerors (Cloutier 2004; Simoneau 2008b) in what was probably the most tense social and economic environment in the Americas immediately after the Seven Years War. Some initial studies suggest that French and British residents in post-Conquest Québec chose different material culture and foodstuffs, making choices that reflected their ethnic and class identities (Scott 2014; Walczesky 2013). While the Spanish, who received the French colonies west of the Mississippi River, did not impose an embargo, it was nonetheless more difficult and more expensive to acquire French goods in the interior Mississippi Valley settlements after the war. Ceramic assemblages from late

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eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French sites, such as the JanisZiegler site in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri (Whitson, this volume), and villages in Illinois (Mazrim 2011), are dominated by British-manufactured wares. Small amounts of French faience and coarse red earthenware continue to occur, and the small size of the sherds suggests that the Frenchmanufactured vessels were being repaired and curated for as long as possible. However, archaeologists also must look at other materials for clues to ethnic French identity on sites dating after the Conquest and Treaty of Paris (1763). One means by which ethnic French identity was maintained was through food choices reflecting distinctive regional cuisines. French colonists incorporated New World wild species into their diets from the beginning, as did other European colonists (Reitz and Waselkov 2015), but variation in the use of wild species increased as French colonies became established in different geographical regions. Where agricultural economies developed in eastern New France and the Mississippi Valley, colonists were able to re-create an Old World French reliance on domestic animals that continued after the Conquest (Martin 2008; Scott 2007). In Lower Louisiana, the French combined wild and domestic species in a cuisine that was easily distinguished from that of neighboring British and American settlers as late as the mid-nineteenth century (Dawdy 2010; Scott 2001b; Scott and Dawdy 2011). By contrast, in the pays d’en haut (Upper Country) of the western Great Lakes and upper Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, French colonists maintained their initial reliance on fish, wild birds, and wild mammals (especially beaver) even in the post-Conquest period, when the British brought greater numbers of domestic mammals to the region (Scott 2008b). The continuation of these regional French colonial cuisines was one means by which a French ethnic identity could be maintained and bolstered under British and Spanish colonial control. If our view of material culture is broadened to include architecture and the cultural landscape, we then find many more examples of a continuation of French cultural traditions long after French rule ceased. Ethnic French-descended communities continued to build their houses and lay out new villages in ways similar to their forebears’ in the New World and France (Boyer 2001; Edwards 2011; Edwards and Pecquet 2004; Mann 2008b; Scott n.d.). Wood was abundant in the heavily forested New World, and many structures were built in the traditional French vernacular style of vertical log construction (Edwards 2006; Gums 2002; Maygarden

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 15

2006). Where stone was readily available, it also was used in a traditional French architectural style, most often seen in the St. Lawrence River valley towns and the Maritime settlements (Fry 1984; Moussette 1994) (see contributions to this volume by Pendery, Whitson, Kelly, and Morgan and MacDonald). Multiple generations of families continued living on the same properties, often in the same houses, through the nineteenth century. The relationship of people to the land and to water is as much a cultural tradition as the built environment; Rob Mann (this volume) shows how voyageurs reckoned time and distance in terms of pipe-smoking and resting, imposing this mental construct on the landscape and river travel, particularly their labor. After the Louisiana Purchase, American movement westward meant engaging with long-standing French communities that stretched from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Especially among the ethnic French elite, marriages with incoming Anglo-American military and merchant families preserved wealth, property, and power so that the French elite remained for some time politically well situated in the former colonies (Gitlin 2010). St. Louis and New Orleans, especially, were important jumping-off places for people and goods headed west. French merchant ties between St. Louis and Santa Fe, such as those of the Robidoux brothers, brought a French influence into the southwestern United States as well (Gitlin 2010:107–114). When Anglo-American fur merchants such as John Astor began to expand into the northwestern United States and Canada in the 1810s, they relied upon Métis and Native canoe crews to transport traders and merchandise, as had been done since the 1600s. The Astor Expedition contracted with crewmen at Montréal and at Michilimackinac; once they arrived in the Northwest, many of these men stayed and settled there (St-Onge 2013). They maintained ties with their families in Québec and eastern Canada while establishing communities in the Northwest whose descendants live there still (Brauner 2014; Hill 2014). Even outside of former French colonial settlements, pockets of new French immigrants were found in the New World, bringing French cultural traditions with them as they attempted to reestablish French communities in North America. Aristocrats fleeing the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in the late 1700s and early 1800s settled in immigrant communities in Pennsylvania (French Azilum) (Mann and Loren 2001; Spaeth 2008), Maryland (Cofield 2006), Ohio (Gallipolis)

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(Cayton 1986), and the middle Mississippi Valley (New Bourbon) (Ekberg 1985:416–455, 2010). Maureen Costura, in her contribution to this volume, shows how important access to preferred foods was to maintaining an aristocratic French identity at French Azilum. As outlined by Steve Pendery in his contribution, many Acadian refugees sought resettlement in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Lower Louisiana, and French Guiana (Brasseaux 1987; Faragher 2005; Rees 2008), attempting to re-create Acadian social and cultural traditions. During the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830), many French who had supported Napoleon were banished and chose to immigrate to America, as did members of the Bonaparte family (Levasseur 2006:131–132, 139–140). As late as the 1830s, communitarian groups such as the Icarians, disillusioned with the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe, left France and settled in Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa (Wiegenstein 2006). Ethnic French descendants who had lived in the former British colonies also continued to identify with their French heritage as citizens in the new American republic. When Lafayette toured the twenty-four American states in 1824–1825, every state had French or French-descended residents who were eager to renew or make acquaintances with him (Levasseur 2006). Some of these were soldiers who, like Lafayette, had fought with the Americans in the Revolution; some were ethnic French whose families had been on their land for generations. Some were proud to call themselves American, while others hoped that Lafayette could manage somehow to take them back into the fold of France. Not only does this volume reveal evidence of the persistence of French cultural traditions, however, but also the persistence of Native American and African cultural traditions. At Madame Coincoin’s plantation in Louisiana, Morgan and MacDonald found a structure with rammed-earth walls, similar to structures in parts of Africa, and a strong presence of both Native American and African ceramic traditions in the slave quarters. In the storehouse at the Jesuit plantation in French Guiana, Loyer Rousselle and Auger found tools and implements used by Jesuits and Native Americans, especially those related to food processing. At Fort St. Joseph, Nassaney and Martin also found evidence, in faunal remains, artifacts, and smudge pits, of the use by French fur traders of Native food and hide-processing methods. French planters, enslaved Africans, and free people of color continued to live on the Caribbean sugar and indigo plantations of Saint Domingue

Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities · 17

(Haiti), Martinique, and Guadeloupe, which France retained after 1763. In his contribution to this volume, Kenneth Kelly shows that African ceramic traditions continued on Martinique and Guadeloupe, but the diets and housing of enslaved Africans actually improved, first after the Haitian Revolution and again after slavery was abolished in 1848. Meredith Hardy outlines the archaeological potential for recovering seventeenthand eighteenth-century remains of the French settlements on St. Croix, which were overwhelmingly populated by enslaved Africans. Both Kelly and Hardy emphasize the enormous potential for archaeology to bring attention to what has been until recently a neglected part of the cultural patrimony of these islands and the Caribbean.

Contributions of the Volume This volume offers new insights into the French colonies in the New World. It also draws our attention to the lesser known period after the Treaty of Versailles and after the ancien régime fell, to the enclaves of ethnic French and French-descended people who continued to live in the New World. The authors combine archaeological remains (from artifacts to food remains to cultural landscapes) with a rich body of historical records to help reveal the roots of present-day New World societies. This volume makes clear that, along with Spanish, British, and early American colonial influences, French colonists and their descendant communities played an important role in New World histories, and continue to do so.

Acknowledgments I want to thank Gregory Waselkov and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the chapter. The thoughts put forth here benefited from discussions I have had over many years with Jay Edwards, Terrance Martin, Charles Orser, Kathryn Sampeck, Keith Widder, and, most of all, Donald Heldman. While I thank them all, I am responsible, of course, for any faults that remain.

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Michigan’s Buried Past: The Archaeology of the Great Lakes State, edited by John R. Halsey, 292–311. Bulletin 64. Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Heldman, Donald P., and Roger T. Grange Jr. 1981 Excavations at Fort Michilimackinac, 1978–1979: The Rue de la Babillarde. Archaeological Completion Report Series, No. 3. Mackinac Island State Park Commission, Mackinac Island, Mich. Hill, Cayla 2014 The Expansion and Influence of Catholicism within the Development of the Oregon Territory: A Case Study of St. Joseph’s College, the First Catholic Boarding School for Boys in the Region. Paper presented at the 47th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, January 8–12, Québec City. Jelks, Edward B., Carl J. Ekberg, and Terrance J. Martin 1989 Excavations at the Laurens Site: Probable Location of Fort de Chartres I. Studies in Illinois Archaeology 5. Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Springfield. Keene, David 1991 Fort de Chartres: Archaeology in the Illinois Country. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 29–41. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Kelly, Kenneth G. 2008 Creole Cultures of the Caribbean: Plantation Archaeology in the French West Indies. Rêves d’Amérique: Regard sur l’archéologie de la Nouvelle-France, edited by Christian Roy and Hélène Coté. Archéologiques, hors série 2:56– 69. 2011 La vie quotidienne: Historical Archaeological Approaches to the Plantation Era in Guadeloupe. In French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and Caribbean, edited by Kenneth G. Kelly and Meredith D. Hardy, 189–205. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Kelly, Kenneth G., and Meredith D. Hardy, eds. 2011 French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and Caribbean. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Kidd, Kenneth E. 1949 The Excavation of Sainte-Marie I. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Lalande, Dominique 1998 Deuxième partie: la collection archéologique du site du monastère des Récollets. In L’archéologie du monastère des Récollets à Québec, edited by William A. Moss, 191–240. Cahiers d’archéologie du CÉLAT, No. 4. CÉLAT, Université Laval, Québec. L’Anglais, Paul-Gaston 1994 La recherché archéologique en milieu urbain: d’une archéologie dans la ville vers une archeology de la ville. Hors série, No. 6. CÉLAT, Université Laval, Québec.

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Le site de l’îlot Hunt: rapport de la deuxième campagne de fouilles (1992). Cahiers d’archéologie du CÉLAT, No. 2. CÉLAT, Université Laval, Québec. Lapointe, Camille 1985 Le site de Chicoutimi: un établissement commercial sur la route des fourrures du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean. Patrimoines Dossier No. 62. Ministère des Affaires Culturelles, Québec. Lennox, Paul A., and William R. Fitzgerald 1990 The Culture History and Archaeology of the Neutral Iroquoians. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650, edited by Chris J. Ellis and Neal Ferris. Occasional Publication of the London Chapter 5:405–456. Ontario Archaeological Society, London, Ont. Le Roux, Yannick, R. Auger, and N. Cazelles 2009 Les jésuites et l’esclavage: Loyola, l’habitation des jésuites de Rémire en Guyane française. Presses de l’Université du Québec, Québec. Levasseur, Auguste 2006 Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825: Journal of a Voyage to the United States. Translated by Alan R. Hoffman. Lafayette Press, Manchester, N.H. Mann, Rob 2008a Pointe-Coupée: Recent Archaeological Investigations at an 18th Century Colonial Settlement in French Louisiana. Archéologiques, hors série 2:127– 140. 2008b From Ethnogenesis to Ethnic Segmentation in the Wabash Valley: Constructing Identity and Houses in Great Lakes Fur Trade Society. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12(4):319–337. 2010 French Colonial Archaeology. In Archaeology of Louisiana, edited by M. A. Rees, 235–257. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. 2015 Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse: Aboriginal Pottery Production in French Colonial Basse Louisiane and the pays d’en haut. In Rethinking Colonial Pasts Through Archaeology, edited by Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox, 268–289. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Mann, Rob, and Diana DiPaolo Loren 2001 Keeping Up Appearances: Dress, Architecture, Furniture, and Status at French Azilum. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5(4):281–307. Markell, Ann, R. Christopher Goodwin, Susan Barrett Smith, and Ralph Draughon 1999 Patterns of Change in Plantation Life in Point Coupée Parish, Louisiana: The Americanization of Nina Plantation, 1820–1890. Submitted by R. Christopher Goodwin and Associates, Inc., to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District. Martin, Terrance J. 1991 Modified Animal Remains, Subsistence, and Cultural Interaction at French Colonial Sites in the Midwestern United States. In Beamers, Bobwhites, and Blue-Points: Tributes to the Career of Paul W. Parmalee, edited by James R. 1998

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Purdue, Walter E. Klippel, and Bonnie W. Styles, 409–419. Illinois State Museum Scientific Papers, No. 23. Illinois State Museum, Springfield. 2008 The Archaeozoology of French Colonial Sites in the Illinois Country. Archéologiques, hors série 2:185–204. Matthews, Christopher N. 1999 Management Report of Excavations at the St. Augustine Site (16OR148), 1999. Greater New Orleans Archaeology Program for the Louisiana Division of Archaeology. Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism, Baton Rouge. 2001 Political Economy and Race: Comparative Archaeologies of Annapolis and New Orleans in the Eighteenth Century. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser, 71–87. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Maygarden, Benjamin D. 2006 Building in Colonial Louisiana: Creolization and the Survival of French Traditions. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10(3):208–236. Mazrim, Robert F. 2011 At Home in the Illinois Country: French Colonial Domestic Site Archaeology in the Midwest 1730–1800. Studies in Archaeology, No. 9. Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana. Monette, Yves, Marc Richer-LaFlèche, Marcel Moussette, and Daniel Dufournier 2007 Compositional Analysis of Local Redwares: Characterizing the Pottery Productions of 16 Workshops Located in Southern Québec Dating from the Late 17th to Late 19th Century. Journal of Archaeological Science 34(2007):123– 140. Morgan, David W., and Kevin C. MacDonald 2011 Colonoware in Western Colonial Louisiana: Makers and Meaning. In French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and Caribbean, edited by Kenneth G. Kelly and Meredith D. Hardy, 117–151. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Morrissey, Robert Michael 2013 Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-Illinois Borderlands, 1695–1735. William and Mary Quarterly 70(1):103–146. Morse, Dan F. 1992 The Seventeenth-Century Michigamea Village Location in Arkansas. In Calumet and Fleur-de-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson, 55–74. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Moss, William, ed. 1998 L’archéologie de la maison Aubert-de-la-Chesnaye à Québec. Cahiers d’Archéologie du CÉLAT 3. CÉLAT, Université Laval, Québec. 2009 The Recent Archaeology of the Early Modern Period in Québec City. PostMedieval Archaeology 43(1).

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Moussette, Marcel 1994 Le site du palais de l’Intendant à Québec: genèse et structuration d’un lieu urbain. Septentrion, Sillery. 2008 Being a Settler at Île-aux-Oies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12(4):277–296. 2009a Prendre la mesure des ombres: Archéologie du rocher de la Chapelle, île aux Oies (Québec). Les Éditions GID, Québec. 2009b A Universe Under Strain: Amerindian Nations in Northeastern North America in the 16th century. Post-Medieval Archaeology 43(1):30–47. Moussette, Marcel, and Gregory A. Waselkov 2014 Archéologie de l’Amérique Coloniale Française. Levesque Éditeur, Québec. Nadon, Pierre 2004 La baie du Grand Pabos. Une seigneurie gaspésienne en Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe siècle. Archéologiques, “Memoires de recherché,” No. 1. Nassaney, Michael S. 2008 Identity Formation at a French Colonial Outpost in the North American Interior. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12(4):297–318. 2015 The Archaeology of the North American Fur Trade. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Nassaney, Michael S., J. Brandão, W. Cremin, and B. A. Giordano 2007 Archaeological Evidence of Daily Life at an 18th Century Outpost in the Western Great Lakes. Historical Archaeology 41(1):1–17. Norris, F. Terry 1991 Ste. Genevieve, a French Colonial Village in the Illinois Country. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 133–148. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pastore, Ralph T. 1994 The Sixteenth Century: Aboriginal Peoples and European Contact. In The Atlantic Region to Confederation: A History, edited by P. A. Buckner and J. G. Reid, 22–39. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnett 2007 Deerskins and Domesticates: Creek Subsistence and Economic Strategies in the Historic Period. American Antiquity 72(1):5–33. Peterson, Jacqueline 1985 Many Roads to Red River: Métis Genesis in the Great Lakes Region, 1680– 1815. In The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, edited by Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, 37–72. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg. Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. 1985 The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg. Peyser, Joseph L., ed. and trans. 1997 On the Eve of the Conquest: The Chevalier de Raymond’s Critique of New

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France in 1754. Michigan State University Press and Mackinac State Historic Parks, East Lansing and Mackinac Island, Mich. Pothier, Louise, and Patricia Simpson 2001 Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. Une chapelle et son quartier. Musée Marguerite-Bourgeois/Fides, Montréal. Reda, John 2013 From Subjects to Citizens: Two Pierres and the French Influence on the Transformation of the Illinois Country. In French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, edited by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, 159–181. Michigan State University Press and University of Manitoba Press, East Lansing and Winnipeg. Rees, Mark A. 2008 From Grand Dérangement to Acadiana: History and Identity in the Landscape of South Louisiana. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12(4):338–359. Reitz, Elizabeth, and Gregory Waselkov 2015 Vertebrate Use at Early Colonies on the Southeastern Coasts of Eastern North America. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19(1):21–45. Rinehart, Charles J. 1990 Crucifixes and Medallions: Their Role at Fort Michilimackinac. Volumes in Historical Archaeology 11. South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Rushforth, Brett 2003 “A Little Flesh We Offer You”: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France. William and Mary Quarterly 60(4):777–808. Samson, Roch 1998 Les Forges du Saint-Maurice. Les débuts de l’industrie sidérurgique au Canada, 1730–1883. Laval University Press, Québec. Schroeder, Walter A. 2002 Opening the Ozarks: A Historical Geography of Missouri’s Ste. Genevieve District, 1760–1830. University of Missouri Press, Columbia. Scott, Elizabeth M. 2001a “An Indolent Slothfull Set of Vagabonds”: Ethnicity and Race in a Colonial Fur-Trading Community. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser Jr., 14–33. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. 2001b Food and Social Relations at Nina Plantation. American Anthropologist 103(3):671–691. 2007 Pigeon Soup and Plover in Pyramids: French Foodways in New France and the Illinois Country. In The Archaeology of Food and Identity, edited by Katheryn C. Twiss, 243–259. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. 2008b Who Ate What? Archaeological Food Remains and Cultural Diversity. In Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology, 2nd ed., edited by Elizabeth J. Reitz, C. Margaret Scarry, and Sylvia J. Scudder, 357–374. Springer, London.

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Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, edited by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, 183–216. Michigan State University Press and University of Manitoba Press, East Lansing and Winnipeg.

Steen, Carl 2002 John de la Howe and the Second Wave of French Refugees in the South Carolina Colony: Defining, Maintaining, and Losing Ethnicity on the Passing Frontier. In Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies, edited by Joe W. Joseph and Martha Zierden, 145–160. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Trigger, Bruce G. 1986 Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montréal/Kingston. Trimble, Michael K., Teresita Majewski, Michael J. O’Brien, and Anna L. Price 1991 Frontier Colonization of the Saline Creek Valley. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 165–188. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 2002 Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context. In From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, edited by Brian Keith Axel, 189–210. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. Trubowitz, Neal L. 1992 Native Americans and French on the Central Wabash. In Calumet and Fleurde-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson, 241–264. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Turgeon, Laurier 1996 From Acculturation to Cultural Transfer. In Transferts culturels et métissages Amérique/Europe, XVIe–XXe siècle/Cultural Transfer, America and Europe: 500 Years of Interculturation, 33–54. Presses de l’Université Laval, Québec. 1998 French Fishers, Fur Traders, and Amerindians during the Sixteenth Century. William and Mary Quarterly 54(4):585–610. Van Kirk, Sylvia 1983 Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Vidal, Cécile 2003 Africains et Européens au pays des Illinois durant la période française (1699–1765). French Colonial History 3:51–68. 2005 Antoine Bienvenu, Illinois Planter and Mississippi Trader: The Structure of Exchange Between Lower and Upper Louisiana. In French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, edited by Bradley G. Bond, 111–133. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. Walczesky, Kristen 2013 An Examination of Dietary Differences Between French and British Households of Post-Conquest Canada. Master’s thesis, Illinois State University.

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Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763. Michigan State University Press and Mackinac State Historic Parks, East Lansing and Mackinac Island, Mich. Wiegenstein, Steve 2006 The Icarians and Their Neighbors. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10(3):283–289. Zitomersky, Joseph 1994 French Americans–Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana: The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s–1760s. Studies in International History, No. 31. Lund University Press, Lund, Sweden. 2013

2 Archaeological Dimensions of the Acadian Diaspora Steven R. Pendery

The story of the French in colonial America is incomplete without an accounting of the experiences of the Acadians. This Francophone group lived on the “fault line” of the French and British empires in an area now comprising parts of the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, and the northeastern area of the state of Maine (Figure 2.1). For a little more than a century after it was established in 1604, the colony of Acadia passed between the two empires a total of ten times (Brasseaux 1991:1). The survival of the Acadians, also known as the French Neutrals, depended on their assuming a neutral stance during periods of colonial conflict (Table 2.1). They drew on their agrarian background in littoral zones of western France to intensively manage their estuarine resources and to trade livestock and produce with both the French and British. Their kin-based settlements, communal labor ethic, and close relationship with Native and other non-European peoples set them apart from other French colonists. Acadian group identity was further reinforced by a single tragic event: expulsion from their homeland by the British in the 1750s at the beginning of the Seven Years War, which eventually dispersed them across the Atlantic world (Figure 2.2). More than 6,300 Acadians were deported, and about 10,000 died as a result of this experience. At the war’s end in 1763, with more than 12,660 Acadians in exile, the French government tried to co-opt repatriated Acadians into an existence as landless agricultural peasants in France and as laborers in tropical colonies. In 1785, more than 1,000 Acadians accepted an invitation by the king of Spain to settle in

Figure 2.1. Initial deportations from Acadia in 1755. Drawing by author.

Table 2.1. Chronology of Acadian History 1604 1605 1613 1632 1644 1654 1670 1690 1697 1713 1730 1749 1755 1758 1763 1764 1785

Exploration and mapping of coastal Acadia by Samuel Champlain and Pierre Dugua; settlement of Saint-Croix Island, Maine First permanent Acadian settlement built at Port-Royal English destroy French settlements in Acadia Under Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Acadia reverts back to France Governor D’Aulnay reports more than twenty menages (households) in Acadia Acadia controlled by England Acadia returned to France under 1667 Treaty of Breda Port-Royal taken by New Englanders Acadia returned to France under Treaty of Ryswick Treaty of Utrecht, permanent loss of Acadia to Great Britain Acadians agree to sign permanent oath of allegiance Halifax founded by British Deportation of Acadians begins; sent to nine British colonies and to England Acadians who fled to Île Saint-Jean (3,000) rounded up and sent to France End of Seven Years War; France loses all American colonies except SaintPierre and Miquelon, Martinique, Saint-Domingue, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe First Acadians arrive in Louisiana from New York and Mobile Spain transports 1,600 Acadians from France to Louisiana

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Figure 2.2. The Acadian diaspora, 1755–1785. Drawing by author.

Louisiana. If any group was both product and victim of French imperial interests in the New World, it was the Acadians (Griffiths 1992:89–90). The Acadian deportation and diaspora have long attracted the attention of European, Canadian, and, more recently, American historians (Arsenault 1965, 2004; Brasseaux 1991; Fonteneau 1996; Griffiths 1973, 1992; Hodson 2012; Lauvrière 1922; Perrin et al. 2014; Winzerling 1955). Ethnic cleansing taking place in Rwanda and Yugoslavia in the 1990s led to renewed interest in precedents such as the eighteenth-century Acadian episode (Faragher 2005:xiii). In wiping the Acadian landscape clean of its French heritage, the British documented their actions and the deportations in a variety of records including military orders, memoranda and diaries, ships’ manifests, colonial office records, and colonial town and provincial records. The memoirs of Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow of Marshfield, Massachusetts, who executed the first deportations (Winslow 1883), are one of the most valuable sources. We also have French administrative records pertaining to the needs of Acadians repatriated to France (Mouhot 2009). These tend to depict a rosier picture of Acadian lives than was actually the case. Schemes to exploit Acadians as laborers in statesubsidized projects at home and abroad have been reviewed recently by

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Hodson (2012). Colonial records also have been used to reconstruct Acadian genealogies (Arsenault 1965, 2004; White 1999) and to develop regional studies of exiled Acadians in the tropics in Haiti (Debien 1978) and French Guiana (Cherubini 2002, 2009), Massachusetts (Belliveau 1972), Louisiana (Brasseaux 1987; Conrad 1978), Maine and New Brunswick (Albert 1982; Craig and Dagenais 2009), Nova Scotia and Québec (Ross and Deveau 1992; Vachon 2014). However, many Acadians did not survive the initial deportations, including entire clans lost at sea in three sunken or wrecked British transports. Acadians themselves left few written narratives other than petitions and testimonies as they struggled to survive. Only fifteen letters between Acadians have been preserved from the eighteenth-century diaspora (Mouhot 2014:257). In 1847, the epic poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie was published by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and was quickly embraced by Acadian descendants as the chronicle of their hardships (Longfellow 2009). Although Longfellow described Evangeline Bellefontaine and her village, Grand-Pré, in detail, he had never visited Nova Scotia nor met an Acadian as far as we know. Regardless, the poem led to public awareness of the Acadian tragedy, the commemoration of the deportation site at Grand-Pré, and the first Acadian heritage tourism.

Research Perspectives There are at least three reasons why we should care about Acadian diaspora sites. The first is that the diaspora resulted in widely varying outcomes for individuals and families, and a detailed understanding of this event may address broader questions about how displaced transnational peoples respond to their plight at any time period (Cohen 1997; Dufoix 2003). How is group identity maintained in face of the splintering of familial and clan ties? How are traditional sets of skills and knowledge retained? In the case of the Acadians, what was the impact of creolization during the course of the diaspora? In this chapter, a diasporic Acadian is defined as one who was deported from Acadia in the 1750s and 1760s or may trace descent from another such individual. The second reason why archaeologists, in particular, should care about these sites is because historical archaeology can contribute to diaspora studies by virtue of its multidisciplinary approach integrating material culture, identity, and heritage issues into the historical study

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of transnational groups. Can we capture the behavior of a mobile group such as the Acadians in the early years of the diaspora through archaeology? (See Rob Mann’s discussion of the issue of mobility and archaeology, this volume.) Historical archaeology of the African and Irish diasporas has already accomplished this through detailed, comparative study of archaeological evidence for architecture, land use, and material culture at homeland and diaspora sites (Brighton 2009:xix–xxii; Orser 2007). In like fashion, archaeology conducted since the 1980s within the Acadian homeland (mainland, peninsular, and insular areas of pre-1750s Acadia) has informed us about key site types such as fortifications, farmhouses, and aboiteaux (field drainage systems using dikes). These sites include the initial settlement in Acadia by the French at Saint Croix Island, Maine (Pendery 2012), early fort sites at Fort Latour (Barka 1965), Fort Pentagoet (Faulkner and Faulkner 1987), Fort Beauséjour and the Camp de l’Esperance (Lavoie 2002), and Fort Sainte-Anne (Duggan 2003). Farm sites and aboiteaux also have been studied (Beanlands 2014; Christianson 1984; Ferguson 1990; Fowler 2006, 2013, 2014; Jobb 2014; Lavoie 1987, 2008; Still 1984). For a recent overview of research on Acadian homeland sites, see Moussette and Waselkov (2014:43–67, 84–103). A third reason to care about the thousands of Acadian diaspora sites located in Louisiana, the eastern United States, the Canadian Maritimes, Great Britain, France, the French Caribbean, French Guiana and the Falkland Islands is that they are actively threatened. These sites tend to be located in coastal or riverine areas prone to erosion, flooding, agricultural disturbance, and development. Southwest coastal Louisiana, rich with Acadian sites, loses an area the size of a football field every forty-five minutes due to sea level rise (Reckdahl 2014). This situation should challenge the archaeological community to implement a coordinated research and inventory project, but in fact very few diaspora sites been excavated and reported on. The excavation conducted by Rees (2008) at the Amand Broussard site in Louisiana is the best and only example. The Département of Poitou-Charentes in France and Université Laval in Québec list some Acadian buildings, monuments, and lieux de memoire (places etched in the national collective memory) in their inventory of heritage locations associated with New France (Département de Poitou-Charentes 2014). This study presents an overview of the promise as well as the problems of conducting an inventory and assessment of Acadian diaspora sites in the Americas. It examines exile settlements in three environmentally diverse

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regions—Massachusetts, French Guiana, and Louisiana—and explores what Naomi Griffiths describes as “Acadian distinctiveness . . . found in the intersection of a number of variables” (Griffiths 1992:45). Core Acadian values included a communal work ethic, proclivity to forming political and matrimonial alliances with neighbors, dependence on extended kinship networks, and maintenance of a French Catholic identity. Acadian frontier culture was marked by dynamic and varied agrarian, maritime, and commercial economies that prepared exiles to adapt to a range of environmental and cultural settings. The promise is that we will recognize patterning in the archaeological evidence for settlement and land use, architecture, foodways, craft production, and consumer behavior by adopting a broad and comparative research design. This could lead to a more nuanced understanding of persistence of traditional behaviors as well as the process of creolization while also fostering public appreciation of Acadian heritage sites and material culture (Ancelet 2014; Rees 2008). Problems may involve the apparent scarcity of documented early Acadian immigrant sites in tropical settings and the low archaeological visibility of Acadians housed as boarders and inmates along with non-Acadians during their passage through northern British colonies.

Acadian Deportations of 1755 Key events leading to the initial deportations in 1755 are summarized in Table 2.1. Deporting the Acadians from their homeland was supposed to reduce the threat of a “fifth column” rising during the beginning stages of the Seven Years War. The British considered it necessary to remove them from Acadia and yet prevent their repatriation to France since they were British subjects. So, approximately 6,300 Acadians were transported in 1755 under miserable conditions on board ships to be distributed among nine British colonies and to England. The passengers arrived at their ports of disembarkation in terrible condition. Overcrowding on board ship, poor nutrition, epidemics of typhus and smallpox, and stress of the deportation took its human toll. Moreover, government administrators at colonial ports were entirely unprepared to deal with the exiles. They, too, were wary of the Acadians despite the fact of their British citizenship. In southern colonies, it was felt that they might incite insurrections among slaves in support of the French and Indians who were positioned along the western frontier. Shortly after their arrival

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in both South Carolina and Georgia, Acadians were encouraged to leave by sea for other destinations. In the former, the colonial assembly even raised funds to purchase and to outfit two vessels for this purpose. Some exiles managed to return to the mouth of the Saint John River in southern Acadia after beaching near Hampton, Virginia, changing ships, and beaching again in Maryland. Harsh treatment in the South led others to remove to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Massachusetts As Governor Shirley of Massachusetts served as commander of New England troops in the Nova Scotia campaigns, his colony received the greatest share of captive Acadians, numbering about 1,500. In November 1755, even before those unfortunates were shipped down to Boston, six ships loaded with Acadians destined for southern ports pulled into Boston harbor to take shelter from a storm. The Massachusetts House of Representatives appointed a committee to inspect the condition of the ships and their human cargo. The transports were found to be overcrowded, the provisions short, and the water bad. Before the vessels were allowed to continue, 134 Acadians were removed from them and placed in private homes or the Boston almshouse. Six vessels bound for Boston included one containing 206 Acadians from Pisiquid and another ship with 136 settlers from Minas Basin (Brasseaux 1991:25). Ninety Acadians were arrested as they landed in Barnstable after traveling by canoe from Georgia in an attempt to reach Nova Scotia. As late as 1762, Nova Scotia sought to ship 600 Acadians to Boston (Belliveau 1972:34). Most were resettled in rural towns where the Overseers of the Poor were authorized to receive and employ them. Few had any resistance to smallpox, which was then prevalent in the Bay Colony. Provincial officials were counting on reimbursement for their expenses from British authorities as evidenced by two entire volumes of the Massachusetts Archives full of petitions and unpaid invoices from caretakers. The binding out of Acadian children occurred but was met with protest (Belliveau 1972:13). As elsewhere in the British North American colonies, Massachusetts sought to disperse and to control its Acadians. Initially, Acadians in rural areas had some freedom of movement and employment, but by 1757 the provincial government began to regiment their behavior (Belliveau

Archaeological Dimensions of the Acadian Diaspora · 39

1972:104, 105). At the end of the war, Acadians regrouped near the coast and entertained thoughts of resettlement in France. When France failed to assist them, a group of 300 left for Saint-Domingue (Brasseaux 1991:27). Hundreds of others found their way to Québec, and others walked overland to Nova Scotia where, finding their ancient lands occupied by New England settlers, they turned back to colonize the Petit Codiac River valley of New Brunswick. Others sailed to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, France’s only remaining colony in North America. A variety of Acadian heritage site types are preserved in Massachusetts. These include the Beacon Hill house site of Thomas Hancock (1703–1764), the merchant uncle of John Hancock who contracted his ships to transport the Acadians in 1755. Another site with extant structures is the mansion of Governor William Shirley (1694–1771), commander in chief for British forces during the deportations. However, one of the most evocative properties is the birthplace and home of Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow (1703–1774) in Marshfield (Krusell 2012). This 1699 property was the seat of the Winslow family, descendants of the Pilgrim governor Edward Winslow of Plymouth. The farm it was attached to may have been rented out during his years of military service during the War of Jenkins Ear (1740–1741), the Acadian campaigns of 1742–1755, and command of Fort William Henry in 1756 (Krusell 2012:30). Winslow retired from military service in 1757 and moved to Hingham in 1773, where he died in 1774. His Marshfield house bears signs of alterations in the Georgian style of the mid-eighteenth century, including exterior quoins, a pedimented portico, interior bolection paneling, plastered ceilings, and tiled fireplaces (Krusell 2012:41). Slave quarters were found in the back. An initial archaeological survey of the property was conducted by the Fiske Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in 2004, resulting in the identification of at least one eighteenth-century pit feature (Hayes et al. 2004). A second house dating to 1730 and associated with Lieutenant-Colonel Winslow is located in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts. A significant juxtaposition of Marshfield sites relating to the Grand Dérangement is represented by the Winslow house and the town’s mideighteenth-century schoolhouse sites. It was here that the families of Acadian exiles Charles Mieuse and Joseph Mitchell were lodged in 1757, families apparently brought back to Marshfield by Winslow himself (Krusell 2012:37). Winslow wrote of the deportation proceedings at Grand-Pré in his journal that “this affair is more grievious to me than any service I

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was ever employed in” (Winslow 1883:134). Did he take a personal interest in the welfare of a select group of deported Acadians to lighten a sense of guilt following his “great fatigue and trouble” in Acadia (Winslow 1883:98)? If so, he then failed to follow through to intervene in the interests of the Mieuse and Mitchell families as Marshfield selectmen having custody over them preyed on their vulnerabilities. As detailed in Joseph Mitchell’s petition filed with the Massachusetts Great and General Court the following week, on March 24, 1756, Marshfield Selectmen John Little and Seth Bryant “came and by force utterly against the will of your Petitioner and his said son, took away your petitioner’s said son; and put him out to Anthony Winslow of Marshfield“ and “that the said Selectmen at the same time bound another of your petitioner’s sons, named Paul about 15 years of age to Nathaniel Cleth of said Marshfield, mariner, whom by force they dragged away and sent to sea.” The petition concluded that “your petitioner being a stranger in a strange land has no where to go for relief but to your Excellency and Honorables” (Belliveau 1972:167–168). Charles Muise’s problems included the theft of a “hogshead of beef and six bushels of salt, which Mr. Lamson seized and now holds under pretext that in law it all belongs to him” (Belliveau 1972:171). If John Winslow was even aware of these issues after his military retirement in 1757, it appears that he did not intervene. The archaeological visibility of Acadian habitation sites in Massachusetts is likely to be variable. The Massachusetts Archives indicates a variety of living arrangements for the Acadians, including boarding with local families as servants as well as residing in nonresidential structures such as schoolhouses. In this last instance, the intrusion of domestic refuse in a nondomestic mid-eighteenth-century archaeological site context may indicate their presence. Another site type, public works projects involving Acadians, may have left an enduring trace on the Massachusetts landscape. The skill of the Acadians in managing estuarine resources, especially the construction of aboiteaux, came to the attention of New Englanders participating in the 1755 conquest. The 1903 Atlas of Plymouth County map of Kingston, Massachusetts, shows the location of an “old Acadian ditch” snaking its way from the center of town and along the margin of the Palmer River (Richards 1903) (Figure 2.3). Study of the site today suggests that this may have started out as a land drainage and reclamation project, possibly the traces of a badly degraded aboiteau (Broussard 2014). Two-and-a-half centuries of winter storms and

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Figure 2.3. “Acadian ditch” shown in 1903 map of Kingston, Massachusetts. L. T. Richards, Atlas of Plymouth Colony (1903).

twentieth-century channel cutting for mosquito control may have taken their toll on Acadian improvements along the Massachusetts shoreline, but documentation of such projects may survive in town and provincial records. These types of sites should be evaluated for State and National Register eligibility. French Guiana After the fall of Louisbourg in 1758, the British invaded the Île Saint-Jean (today’s Prince Edward island) and deported two-thirds of its Acadians directly to French seaports, including Nantes, Morlaix, and Saint-Malo. Additional Acadians were repatriated to France from England at the conclusion of the war in 1763. The situation of Acadians in France and England is outside the scope of this study, but their presence in the Old World had very real consequences for France’s remaining New World colonies such as Saint-Domingue and French Guiana. French ministers were beginning to conclude that it would be an advantage to transition their tropical colonies to a free white labor force rather than to use enslaved Africans. The value of this approach was demonstrated by the wealth evidently accruing to the northern British American colonies that were less dependent on slavery than those farther south (Hodson 2012:105). It was hoped that the industriousness demonstrated by Acadians in their homeland could be replicated elsewhere in the tropics. Acadians who had been deported to Georgia and South Carolina in 1755 were familiar with southern climes and were less than enthusiastic

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about a move to the tropics. However, Acadians from Brittany, New England, Saint-Pierre, and Miquelon were induced to migrate to French Guyana in the vanguard of nearly 9,000 to 12,000 settlers recruited from Alsace and Germany. Their intended destination, the newly established port of Kourou, north of Cayenne, had neither shelter nor supplies, and so recent European immigrants were detained off-shore in the three Îles de Salut, where most of them died. These islands formerly held the less salubrious name of les Îles du Diable, or Devil’s Islands. The governor of Cayenne, who had served in Acadia, helped to ensure that the relatively small numbers of Acadians were transported to the coastal town of Sinnamary located north of Kourou. Barracks and a church had been constructed with Indian and slave labor at a river crossing to receive the immigrants (Figure 2.4). Families soon relocated to their concessions along the river and coast. Disease was still rampant, and death registers for Sinnamary in 1764 show a loss of eighty Acadians in that year (Cherubini 2009:149). In 1764 as today, dense jungle surrounds Sinnamary, although there is savanna suitable for cattle grazing directly west of the coastal fringe. The littoral contains rich estuarine zones with fish, sea turtles, and waterfowl. River silt provided for some good planting fields. Native groups were never far away, with whom goods and food could be traded. Finally, enslaved Africans were available to those who could afford them. As Cherubini (2002:33–34) indicates, the French Guiana littoral was a setting where new sociocultural experiments played out in the past as in the present. Between 1668 and 1762, Jesuit presence in this area was marked by the establishment of the habitation (plantation) Loyola on the Island of Cayenne and missions established at Karouabo (1709), Kourou (1713), and Sinnamary (1736). Loyola was essentially a plantation based on intensive slave labor; the missions succeeded in attracting Natives of the Galibi group, but not necessarily converting them in part because of their high mobility (see Loyer Rousselle and Auger, this volume; Collomb 2006:24–28). In 1763, barely a year after the Jesuits were expelled from the colony, their mission sites in Kourou and Sinnamary were designated as ports-of-arrival for newly arrived Acadian and European immigrants, whose success is described below. Since 1970, the principal area of Acadian settlement between Kourou and Sinnamary is taken up by the Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG), which serves the European Union. A comparison of the censuses of Sinnamary in 1765 and 1767 reveals much about the origins and motives of the settlers (Puaux and Philippe

Figure 2.4. View of encampment at Sinnamary by Jean-Baptiste Tugny, 1767. Courtesy of Collection Archives Départementales de la Guyane, Cayenne, French Guiana.

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1997:61, Table 7). Initially, refugees from Acadia and Île Saint-Jean were in the majority, although their numbers dwindled within a couple of years. The age structure of most settlers was biased toward the young. Those Acadians who remained appear to have adapted to their new social, economic, and natural environment in ways reminiscent of the localism found in Acadian homeland settlements. The system of land tenure, consisting of families being allotted habitations, or in Creole, bitasyons (occupation sites), configured along the coast and rivers in narrow strips, facilitated traditional patterns of traveling by canoe, exploiting resources, and transporting goods to market. The average habitation included portions of several ecozones. Within a typical habitation one may find food procurement practices including harvesting of sea turtles, hunting, fishing, and cultivating manioc and grain in an abbatis (a manmade clearing). The 1787 property plat for the widow Guillon from two decades after initial settlement shows inclusion of savanna, woodlands, river frontage, and road frontage (Grevost 1787a). The surveyor’s map of an oceanfront property in Corossoni also shows a similar strategy for a property where cotton and manioc were grown in addition to savanna and clearings possibly for livestock (Grevost 1787b). A menagerie emphasized livestock production, which might number from twenty-five to fifty head of cattle. These properties contrasted with the estates of the esclavagists (plantation slaveholders), which focused more on sugarcane monoculture based on large-scale slave labor, an example being Prefontaine’s own French Guiana estate and the habitation of the Jesuits in Remire (Le Roux et al. 2010; Hodson 2012:94, 95). Small habitations were highly adaptive to social, economic, and even environmental change in the Guyanese littoral. However, they also acted to replicate traditional aspects of Acadian social and cultural life. Cartographic sources and settlement pattern evidence show clusters of about ten families on adjacent strips of land in rural Sinnamary (Figure 2.5). This allowed for cooperative work (called the mayouri) and for maintaining active face-to-face social relations (Létard 2007:24). Bernard Cherubini has likened the initial settlement of about forty Acadian families in the area of Sinnamary between 1764 and 1840 to a petite paysannerie (small peasantry) operating outside of the dominant colonial plantation economy (Cherubini 2009:152). Creolization may have accelerated after emancipation in 1848 to the point where there was little or no subsequent mention of an Acadian presence left in French Guiana. Coëta lists

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Figure 2.5. Habitations between the Paracou River and Sinnamary, French Guiana, possibly 1764. Courtesy of Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer, France.

Sinnamary plantation owners who freed their slave families before emancipation in 1848, reference being made to the older females as being the owner’s slave and concubine (Coëta 1992:82, 83). What can archaeology tell us about the material lives of this isolated and relatively short-lived community of Acadians? Cherubini presents a thesis directly relevant to this study, that the Acadian settlement pattern supported their distinctive form of social organization that arose from the exigencies of life in Acadia, and that this was later reproduced in French Guiana (Cherubini 2009:170). He further speculates that Acadian influences may still be found in linguistic data, in communal patterns of slaughtering livestock, and in the evolution of dance and music (Cherubini 2009:165, 170). We may also ask the question how creolization operated to blend Acadian with Native American, African, French, and other European influences in areas such as horticulture, architecture, and foodways and how these may be detected through archaeology. Preservation of organic remains in archaeological contexts is expected to be minimal; however, pottery is usually preserved and can be an indicator of creolization in foodways and craft production (see Morgan and MacDonald, this

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volume). There is an 8,000-year tradition of pottery manufacture in Amazonia, and Amerindian pottery would certainly be expected from colonial period sites (Briand 1997:87–98). African clay tobacco pipes were found at Loyola, and African slaves almost certainly produced ceramics for use in sugar refineries and for household use (see Loyer Rousselle and Auger, this volume). How these traditions may have been blended and whether there was a Guyanese “colonoware” phenomenon similar to that of Louisiana (see Morgan and MacDonald, this volume) and the southeastern United States and which entered the colonial marketplace remains to be explored by archaeologists along coastal French Guiana. The core of Acadian settlement fell within the now-restricted area of the CSG; however, key archaeological resources may be preserved in the nearby town of Sinnamary. These would include its 1764 street system, port, church, fort, barracks, and Indian lodgings (Figure 2.4). Six long barracks were set back from the river on high ground to avoid flooding (in areas now slated for development). The author’s rapid architectural survey revealed that most extant buildings sported nineteenth- or twentieth-century hardware fittings, although the core buildings themselves may be earlier. Termite infestations may explain the apparent absence of earlier buildings, but only archaeological study will disclose whether early Acadian house sites are present. The most accessible Acadian habitation sites in Sinnamary are those extending along the coastal road heading south out of town toward Paracou Creek (Figure 2.5). This road is at the interface of oceanfront mangrove wetlands and mixed savanna and woodlands toward the interior. Sea level rise and the shifting French Guiana shoreline may have increased seawater saturation of this area since the eighteenth century. Given the colonial period strip system of land division and settlement, owners may simply have moved or rebuilt their houses farther inland, a hypothesis that may be tested archaeologically. Archaeology may also trace the evolution of the habitation from its earlier years (Le Roux 1994). As described by Coëta for the twentieth century and confirmed by current observation, traditional timber-framed houses have a basic two-room plan, each with its own front-facing door and with an integral rear shed (Coëta 1992:68). Walls have wattle (or lath) and daub infill, and exterior walls receive an additional coating of rough-cast. There may be possible Acadian or even Alsatian influences seen in French Guiana’s wood-framed architecture. Two-room houses are also spread across

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the Antilles and may be a postemancipation expression of an earlier type of slave house. Creolization also involved the blending of Acadian, European, African, and Native practices of harvesting food from the sea, savanna, and woodlands (Dawdy and Matthews 2010:288; Le Roux 1994). Food remains from domestic archaeological sites may help to elucidate whether there was a shift from wild to domestic food sources over time. The impact of new foodstuffs such as manioc on the Acadian household economy and diet may also be revealed. The immediate neighbors of the Acadians included Germans, Alsatians, and metropolitan French as well as their African slaves (Puaux and Philippe 1997:61, Table 7). With time, Acadians intermarried with members of all of these groups, generating diverse Guyanese creole cuisines. Louisiana The field of study of Louisiana’s Acadians is a rich one, plowed numerous times in several directions, always producing new information. For historical background information, the reader is referred to key secondary sources including Winzerling (1955); Arsenault (2004:307–344); Conrad (1978); Brasseaux (1987, 1991:61–69); Perrin et al. (2014); and Hodson (2012:194–98). Louisiana Acadian heritage and tourism are two other areas of academic interest (Ancelet 2014; Le Menestrel 1999; Rees 2008, 2014). In stark contrast, the bibliography of Acadian archaeology in Louisiana is remarkably brief, with only a single entry (Rees 2008). This discussion focuses on the problems and promises of this type of archaeology. The principal Acadian migrations to Louisiana took place over two different periods, the 1760s and the mid-1780s. The total number of about 2,650 immigrants represents not even half of the Acadians caught up in the Grand Dérangement. However, the Louisiana group was a fairly representative sample of deported and displaced Acadians whose new land grants, distributed across a range of environmental zones, allowed them to establish a sustainable New Acadia and to maintain an Acadian identity. Louisiana was transferred from France to Spain in 1762 by secret agreement, and the Spanish government was eager to put the Acadians to use. The military vulnerabilities of Spanish Louisiana lay both to the north and west, and it was to these areas that the first Acadian immigrants were directed. The first wave of immigrants arrived in 1764 and settled

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Figure 2.6. Areas of Acadian settlement in Louisiana. Drawing by author.

on the Mississippi above New Orleans (Figure 2.6). A second wave, including Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, who had diverted their voyage from Halifax to Saint-Domingue to New Orleans, was granted land in the Attakapas District (Brasseaux 1991:62). Once established, they sought to reunite their dispersed families from Maryland and Pennsylvania. The second major wave of Acadians arrived from France in 1785 aboard seven vessels. These included families that had been repatriated to France from the Île Saint-Jean in 1758 and were later resettled by the French government at Belle-Isle-en-Mer and at the village expressly built for them at Archigny, near Poitiers. This second group had corresponded with relatives in Louisiana since the 1760s and learned of their success (Mouhot 2014). The Spanish government committed to provide land grants, stipends, transportation, tools, and, later on, housing for the Acadians. The response was overwhelming to the extent that New Orleans was unprepared for the sudden influx of more than 1,000 immigrants.

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This triggered the construction of new facilities: the customhouse was turned into a camp, and a “wooden hall 200 by 26 feet capable of housing 800 people” was built, along with a hospital (Winzlerling 1955:140, 141). The district of Algiers was the likely setting for these improvements, and where archaeological remains may yet be preserved. Each group of Acadian immigrants was allowed to deliberate about the selection and surveying of land grants they later occupied. La Fourche and Terrebonne Parishes and Baton Rouge were among the main destinations for the immigrants. By February 1786, Spanish officials had managed to transport and settle in Louisiana 1,587 Acadians plus twenty-eight stowaways, representing about 375 families. Today, Acadiana includes twenty-two Louisiana parishes. The French strip or ladder system of land grants was perpetuated in Louisiana and was familiar to the Acadians. Typically, holdings radiated out from the centerline of the Mississippi River and its bayous, where some of the best land could be found. No first-period Acadian houses are known to survive in Louisiana, but it is suspected that these were situated on high land close to waterways, where housing is located today. Conducting survey work to discover early Acadian settlements is a stated priority of Louisiana’s Comprehensive Archaeology Plan, but little progress has been made toward meeting this goal (Rees 2014:4). The physical integrity of these sites may have been compromised both by recent development and by deep plowing for sugarcane cultivation. Apparently the only Acadian house site that has been systematically tested is the Amand Broussard site, “Fausse Pointe,” on the Teche Ridge in Louisiana (Rees 2008, 2014; Rees et al. 2003). Born in Chipoudy, Acadia, about 1754, Broussard was the youngest son of the famous Joseph dit Beausoleil Broussard. He arrived with his family on the Bayou Teche in Louisiana in 1765 and later developed this area as a cattle and cotton plantation with the assistance of his twenty-eight slaves. His house dates to the period 1790– 1818 and was moved to New Iberia in 1979 and later to the Vermilionville Museum. The site was tested by Rees’s team with four 1 by 1 m units and forty-six 25 by 25 cm units and at least one intact early feature containing a mixture of eighteenth- to twentieth-century artifacts was identified as well as a possible midden (Rees et al. 2003:44, 49, 2008:349–352). It is evident that open excavations are required to explore this type of site. A search for the camps and grave sites of Joseph and Alexandre Broussard and other early settlers at Fausse Pointe near present-day Loreauville will

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continue under the New Acadia Project, which has partnered with the Acadian Heritage and Culture Foundation. Public outreach and involvement in archaeology are among the goals of this project. Anthropological archaeology is comparative in nature, and the presence of a wide range of Acadian sites in Louisiana invites this type of approach. Here, as at other diaspora settings, archaeology would be an appropriate tool to explore the dynamic of Acadian colonization and settlement formation helping to document the transition of Acadian to Cajun culture (Brasseaux 1992). As seen at the Amand Broussard site, there is both value and urgency to maximize our understanding of the evolution of settlement pattern and architecture of individual sites in face of threats from development, agricultural pressure, and sea level rise. Archaeological survey should also focus on drainage and other forms of land modification, husbandry, and, of course, the institution of slavery as practiced by Acadians. How did these practices vary across different diaspora sites? What is inherently Acadian about them? Are there differences among the 1760s and mid-1780s Louisiana settlements?

International Archaeologies of Diaspora Families Acadian diaspora sites, including those discussed above, are scattered across continents, regions, and countries. Three ships sank or were wrecked while transporting Acadians to Europe, including the Ruby, killing 200 of its passengers on the coast of the Azores island of Pico. In this emerging age of robotics, such a submerged resource may someday become accessible. This chapter argues that all terrestrial and submerged Acadian sites are potentially significant in helping us gain a better understanding of the intentional and unintended consequences of the “Great and Noble Scheme” to deport the Acadians from their homeland in 1755 and from their place of refuge on Prince Edward Island in 1758 (Faragher 2005). Acadian homeland sites give us a baseline on Acadian culture as it developed over the course of five generations until the British attempted to erase it. Acadian diaspora sites are potentially significant for the information they may contain about adaptive strategies for the following eight generations. All Acadian deportees left behind some material traces of their shattered lives and early deaths embedded in the sites they occupied and graves where they were laid to rest. A proposal for the thematic inventory and sampling of these diaspora

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sites is being developed by the author at CÉLAT (Centre Interuniversitaire d’Études sur les Lettres, les Arts, et les Traditions), Université Laval in Québec. This project involves identifying archaeological and heritage sites of Acadian families associated with each of the 1755 deportations into nine British colonies subsequent to major movements to nodal points in the post-1762 diaspora (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). This approach has been explored with some success for an extended Acadian family, the Naquins, who were among the refugees from the Île Saint-Jean deported to France in 1758 and who moved to Louisiana in 1785.

Conclusion The Seven Years War was a turning point for the Acadians as it was for other Euro-Americans. By 1760, most of their estimated population of 12,000 to 18,000 had been either deported or displaced by British imperative. At the conclusion of the war in 1763, there remained little left of the French empire in the Americas to support them. Most Acadians rejoiced at the news in 1785 that the king of Spain invited them to occupy parts of Louisiana. However, an equally large number had settled into creolized Acadian lives in other diaspora locations far from Louisiana, including the Canadian Maritimes and the Saint Lawrence River valley, the upper reaches of the Saint John River, coastal French Guiana, and SaintDomingue. These New Acadias initially expressed core Acadian cultural patterns of behavior, values, and identity that progressively blended with those of neighboring groups. One common denominator was that settlements straddled different ecological zones, allowing them to exploit both wild and cultivated food resources. Cooperation with near neighbors regardless of race and ethnicity was another. A key value was cooperation and support within the Acadian community itself, which enabled communal labor projects and helped to maintain a sense of Acadian and French Catholic identity. The Acadian diaspora experience stands in contrast with those of other Francophone groups in the Americas exiled from France and Saint-Domingue following their respective revolutions. As indicated by Maureen Costura (this volume), exiles from aristocratic and planter classes grew discontented in the rustic settings of North America if unable to match the refinement of their previous lifestyles. The term “diaspora” comes from the Greek dia (over) and speiro (sow), which implies dispersal as well as new colonization. The initial British

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deportation of Acadians in 1755 attempted to thwart any effort on their part to reunite. However, successive projections of Acadians into the Atlantic world by Britain, France, and Spain led them to reunite, to colonize new territory, and to continue to serve willingly as a military and cultural buffer for European colonization programs. Settlement patterns and architectural and archaeological information from French Guiana and Louisiana suggest important ties between their environmental and social relations allowing these communities to thrive, splinter off, and flourish across multiple generations. The British inadvertently spawned multiple New Acadias across the Atlantic world instead of suppressing the Acadian culture as intended. This chapter explores only a sample of Acadian diaspora areas in North America, but each example reveals the ongoing loss of sites due to disturbance by agriculture, development, and sea level rise. Compiling an inventory of these sites and evaluating, documenting, and protecting the significant ones are international challenges that we must support.

Acknowledgments I thank volume editor Elizabeth Scott for her invitation to contribute to this volume. I also acknowledge the support of Kristen Sarge of the Service de l’Inventaire General du Patrimoine in Cayenne; Eric Gassies and Michelle Hamblin of DRAC de Guyane; Marianne Palisse of the Université de Guyane; and Yannick and Martine Le Roux. For research in Louisiana I benefited from discussions with Albert Naquin, chief of the Isle de Jean-Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, Rob Mann of Saint Cloud State University, and Mark Rees of Louisiana State University at Lafayette. At Université Laval I thank Réginald Auger for his support of the Acadian sites inventory project. Finally, I thank Elisa for her usual encouragement and patience.

References Cited Albert, Thomas 1982 [1920] Histoire du Madawaska. La Société historique du Madawaska. Éditions Hurtubise HMH, Montréal. Ancelet, Barry Jean 2014 Acadian and Cajun Cultural Tourism. In Acadie, Then and Now, edited by Warren Perrin, Mary B. Perrin, and Phil Comeau, 56–65. Andrepont Publishing, South Opelousas, La.

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Archives Départementales de Guyane 1767 Vue du Camp de Sinnamary by Jean-Baptiste Tugny. Archives Départementales de la Guyane, Cayenne, French Guiana. Arsenault, Bona 1965 Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens. Vol. 1. Le Conseil de la Vie Française en Amérique. Québec. 2004 [1966] Histoire des Acadiens. Nouveau édition mis à jour de Pascal Alain. Editions Fides, Québec. Barka, Norman F. 1965 Historic Sites Archaeology at Portland Point, New Brunswick, Canada, 1631– ca. 1850 A.D. [sic]. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University. Beanlands, Sara 2014 The Landcestors: Preserving Acadian History in a Planter Settlement. Paper presented at the 47th Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, January 8–12, Québec City. Belliveau, Pierre 1972 French Neutrals in Massachusetts. Ballard Brothers, Manchester, N.H. Brasseaux, Carl A. 1987 The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. 1991 “Scattered to the Wind”: Dispersal and Wanderings of the Acadians, 1755– 1809. Louisiana Life Series 6, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette. 1992 Acadian to Cajun. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson. Briand, Jérôme 1997 La céramique amérindienne. In L’Archéologie en Guyane, edited by Marlène Mazière, 89–98. Association pour la Protection du Patrimoine Archéologique et Architectural de la Guyane, Paquez et Fils, Châlons-enChampagne, France. Brighton, Stephen A. 2009 Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora: A Transnational Approach. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Broussard, Whitney P. 2014 The Acadian Aboiteau: A Cultural and Economic Keystone. In Acadie, Then and Now, edited by Warren Perrin, Mary Perrin, and Phil Comeau, 159–166. Andrepont Publishing, Opelousas, La. Cherubini, Bernard 2002 Interculturalité et créolisation en Guyane Française. Publication du Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur la Construction Identitaire. L’Harmattan, Paris. 2009 Les Acadiens en Guyane (1765–1848): une “societé d’habitation” à la marge ou la résistance d’un modèle d’organisation sociale. Port Acadie (2008– 2009): 147–172.

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Christianson, David 1984 Belleisle 1983: Excavations at a Pre-Expulsion Acadian Site. Curatorial Report 48, The Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax. Coëta, Rene-Claude 1992 Sinnamary (1624–1848), une cité et des hommes. L’Harmattan, Clamecy, France. Cohen, Robin 1997 Global Diasporas. University of Washington Press, Seattle. Collomb, Gérard 2006 Introduction. In Les Indiens de la Sinnamary, edited by Gérard Collomb, 7–37. Éditions Chandeigne, Paris. Conrad, Glenn, ed. 1978 The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture. Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwest Louisiana, Lafayette. Craig, Beatrice, and Maxime Dagenais 2009 The Land In Between. Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Me. Dawdy, Shannon Lee, and Christopher N. Matthews 2010 Colonial and Early Antebellum New Orleans. In Archaeology of Louisiana, edited by Mark A. Rees, 273–290. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. Debien, Gabriel 1978 The Acadians in Santo Domingo: 1764–1789. In The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture, edited by Glenn Conrad, 21–98. Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwest Louisiana, Lafayette. Département de Poitou-Charentes 2014 Inventory of “Lieux de Memoire de la Nouvelle France.” http://inventairenf. cieq.ulaval.ca:8080/inventaire/. Dufoix, Stephane 2003 Diasporas. University of California Press, Berkeley. Duggan, Rebecca 2003 Archaeological Excavations at the Southwest Glacis 1989–1992. Fort Anne National Historic Site of Canada. Atlantic Service Center, Parks Canada Agency. Faragher, John Mack 2005 A Great and Noble Scheme. W. W. Norton, New York. Faulkner, Alaric, and Gretchen Fearon Faulkner 1987 The French at Pentagoet, 1635–1674: An Archaeological Portrait of the Acadian Frontier. Occasional Papers in Maine Archaeology, Maine Archaeological Society, Augusta. Ferguson, Rob 1990 The Search for Port la Joye: Archaeology at the Île Saint Jean’s First French Settlement. Island Magazine 27:3–8.

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Fonteneau, Jean-Marie 1996 Les Acadiens, citoyens de l’Atlantique. Éditions Ouest-France, Rennes, France. Fowler, Jonathan 2006 Geophysics and the Archaeology of an Ethnic Cleansing: The Case of GrandPré National Historic Site of Canada. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop, CNR, Rome. British Archaeological Reports International Series 1568:137–142. 2013 See through the Soil with Archaeogeophysics at the Thibodeau Site. Archaeology in Nova Scotia: 2012 News 4:1–5. Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax. 2014 Site Report. Société Promotion Grand-Pré, Grand-Pré National Historic Site. http://www.grand-pre.com/en/site-report.html. Grevost, Gabriel 1787a Plan de l’habitation ou terrein de La De. Ve. Guillon situe pres Carouabo. Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France. 1787b Plan d’un terrain situé sur l’Anse de Corossoni. Archives Nationales d’Outremer, Aix-en-Provence, France. Griffiths, Naomi E. S. 1973 The Acadians: Creation of a People. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Toronto. 1992 The Contexts of Acadian History, 1686–1784. McGill-Queens University Press, Montréal. Hayes, Katherine Howlett, Stephen Silliman, and Elizabeth Kiniry 2004 Initial Survey and Identification of Archaeological Resources at the Historic Winslow House. Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Unpublished report on file, Historic Winslow House Association of Marshfield, Marshfield, Mass. Hodson, Christopher 2012 The Acadian Diaspora. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Jobb, Dean 2014 Nova Scotia Farm Unites Two Families in Search of Their Past. In Acadie, Then and Now, edited by Warren Perrin, Mary B. Perrin, and Phil Comeau, 270–273. Andrepont Publishing, Opelousas, La. Krusell, Cynthia Hagar 2012 Winslows of Careswell in Marshfield. Historical Research Associates, Marshfield, Mass. Lauvrière, Emile 1922 La tragédie d’un peuple, histoire du peuple Acadien de ses origines à nos jours, 2 vols. Éditions Bossard, Paris. Lavoie, Marc 1987 Belleisle, Nova Scotia, 1680–1755: Acadian Material Life and Economy. Curatorial Report 65. Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax. 2002 Les Acadiens et Les Planteurs des Maritimes: une Etude des Deux Ethnies, de 1680 à 1820. Ph.D. diss., Université Laval.

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2008

Un Nouveau Regard sur le Monde Acadien Avant la Déportation, Archéologie au Marais de Belle Isle, Nouveau Ecosse. Archeologiques. Collections “Hors Serie” 2:70–95. Association des Archeologues du Québec, Québec. Le Menestrel, Sara 1999 La voie des Cadiens. Belin, Paris. Le Roux, Yannick 1994 L’Habitation Guyanaise Sous l’Ancien Régime: Étude de La Culture Matérielle. Vols. 1–3. Ph.D. diss., École des Hauts Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Le Roux, Yannick, Réginald Auger, and Nathalie Cazelle 2010 Les Jésuites de Remire en Guyane Française. Presses Université du Québec, Québec City. Létard, Raphaël 2007 L’Enfant de la mangrove. Presses de l’Imprimerie Départementale, French Guiana. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 2009 [1847] Evangeline. Edited by Lewis B. Semple. Pelican Publishing, Gretna, La. Mouhot, Jean-Francois 2009 Les refugies acadiennes en France. Septentrion, Québec. 2014 Letter by Jean-Baptiste Semer. In Acadie Then and Now, edited by Warren A. Perrin, Mary B. Perrin, and Phil Comeau, 263–269. Acadia Heritage and Cultural Foundation, Opelousas, La. Moussette, Marcel, and Gregory Waselkov 2014 Archéologie de l’Amérique Colonial Française. Levesque Éditeur, Montréal. Orser, Charles E. 2007 The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Pendery, Steven R., ed. 2012 Saint Croix Island, Maine: History, Archaeology, and Interpretation. Occasional Publications in Maine Archaeology, Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta. Perrin, Warren, Mary B. Perrin, and Phil Comeau, eds. 2014 Acadie Then and Now. Andrepont Publishing, South Opelousas, La. Puaux, Olivier, and Michel Philippe 1997 Archéologie et histoire du Sinnamary du XVIIe au XXe s. Documents d’Archéologie Française 60. Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. Reckdahl, Katy 2014 Losing Louisiana. In Acadie, Then and Now, edited by Warren Perrin, Mary Perrin, and Phil Comeau, 218–228. Andrepont Publishing, South Opelousas, La. Rees, Mark A. 2008 From Grand Dérangement to Acadians: History and Identity in the Landscape of South Louisiana. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12(4):338–359.

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2014

The New Acadia Project: Public Archaeology and Mythistory in Acadiana. Paper presented at the 47th Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, January 8–12, Québec City. Rees, Mark, Lance Blanchard, Christi Rouly, Lanelle Urias, and Lisa Woodward 2003 Test Excavations at the Amand Broussard Site (161B75): Results of the UL Lafayette 2002–2003 Archaeology Field School. Unpublished report on file, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Richards, L. T. 1903 Map of Kingston. In Atlas of Plymouth County. L. T. Richards, publisher. Kingston Public Library, Kingston, Mass. Ross, Sally, and Alphonse Deveau 1992 The Acadians of Nova Scotia. Nimbus Publishing, Halifax. Still, Leslie 1984 Analysis of Faunal Remains from the Belleisle Site, Nova Scotia. In Belleisle 1983: Excavations of a Pre-Expulsion Acadian Site, edited by David Christianson, 79–97. Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax. Vachon, André-Carl 2014 Les Déportations des Acadiens et leur arrivée au Québec, 1755–1775. La Grande Marée, Tracadie-Sheila, Canada. White, Stephen 1999 Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes 1636–1714. Première Partie 1636 à 1714 en Deux Volumes. Centre d’Etudes Acadiennes, Université de Moncton, New Brunswick. Winslow, John 1883 [1755] Journal of John Winslow of the Provincial Troops, While Engaged in Removing the French Acadian Inhabitants from Grand Pre, and the Neighboring Settlements in the Autumn of the Year 1755. Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 3:71–196. Winzerling, Oscar William 1955 Acadian Odyssey. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.

3 “They Are Fit to Eat the Divel and Smoak His Mother” Labor, Leisure, Tobacco Pipes, and Smoking Customs among French Canadian Voyageurs during the Fur Trade Era Rob Mann

During the fur trade era (ca. 1680–1880), much of the labor needed to transport goods, furs, and people between the interior of North America and entrepôts in the East was provided by French Canadian voyageurs. The voyageurs were contracted retainers who signed on to the fur trade labor market as boatmen (Murphy 2000:54–55). By the early nineteenth century, as many as 3,000 French Canadian voyageurs were plying the streams, rivers, and lakes of North America (Podruchny 2006:4; St-Onge 2013:184). In 1850, German “geographer, ethnologist, and travel-writer” Johann Georg Kohl encountered one such voyageur during his travels around Lake Superior (Bieder 1985:xiii). Kohl, who took a keen interest in the lives and culture of the voyageurs he met and traveled with, asked this voyageur, “Où restez-vous?” which Kohl noted means “where do you live?” or “where is your home?” The voyageur responded: Où je reste? Je ne peux pas te le dire. Je suis Voyageur-je suis Chicot, monsieur. Je reste partout. Mon grandpere etait Voyageur: il est mort en voyage. Mon pere etait Voyageur: il est mort en voyage. Je mourrai aussi en voyage, et un autre Chicot prenda ma place.1 Such is our course of life. (Kohl 1985:260) It is this sense of being everywhere and belonging nowhere that historian Carolyn Podruchny (1999:43) is speaking of when she notes that the world of the voyageurs was “shaped by liminality”—the feeling of living

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in a time out of time and of being cut off from normal social contacts and social spaces (Podruchny 2002, 2006). Thus, Kohl (1985:259–260) wrote that the voyageurs he encountered around Lake Superior “regarded themselves as exiles” from their “real homes” in Lower Canada. Magdalena Naum (2013:165) has written of how such venturing, while rife with “opportunities of reinventing oneself ” and the promise of escape from the “tight confines of social rules and stigmas,” was also a break from the familiar that could “lead to longing and homesickness.” For the voyageurs, Podruchny (2006:15) contends that the “process of continual movement in the fur trade workplace made it a liminal space” and that within this “liminal space they created an incipient and fluid social order that . . . embodied a range of values and beliefs that helped voyageurs order their world.” In such liminal spaces, characterized in the case of the voyageurs by fluidity, transformation, and near constant movement (Podruchny 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006; St-Onge 2008, 2013), it is difficult if not impossible to draw discrete temporal or spatial boundaries around workplace and residence. It is also difficult to distinguish between “work” and “leisure” among the voyageurs. Almost everything the voyageurs did in their daily lives helped them to order time and space, establish and maintain social identities that set them apart from their primarily British or American masters, and therefore exert some control over their own lives and labor (Podruchny 2006:89). For example, much has been written about the voyageurs’ chansons, the songs they sang to keep time as they paddled (e.g., Barbeau 1954; Kohl 1985:253–265; Nute 1987:103–155; Podruchny 2006:89–93). It is perhaps easy to romanticize this practice as simply a form of leisure, something done to distract them from the tedium of paddling and a “forum for pleasure and creativity” (Podruchny 2006:89). But singing was also part of the labor process itself. In his study of coal miners in northern England, Young (2013:62) notes that although the actual workplace of deep-shaft miners is “beyond the reach of archaeological excavation,” vernacular traditions, including songs, can “bring archaeologists directly into contact with the active social relations of production.” Likewise, the voyageurs’ workplace while en voyage is mostly out of reach to archaeologists. The voyageurs’ chansons do, however, help connect scholars to the voyageurs’ “social and economic relations, selfimage, past experiences, and aspirations” (Young 2013:62). For the voyageurs, singing was a way to “humanize the work place,” and

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it set the pace for the most important aspect of the voyageurs’ daily labor regime, paddling the birch bark canoes that were the mainstays of the fur trade transportation system (Podruchny 2006:89). Kohl (1985:255–256) noted that the voyageurs had different categories of chansons for different types of paddling and that they “consider singing as specially necessary to give them fresh mental strength for the bodily exertion.” In the 1820s, Dr. John J. Bigsby served as the secretary and medical officer for the commission tasked to survey the international boundary between the United States and Canada as stipulated in the 1814 Treaty of Ghent. In his account of his travels through the Great Lakes and beyond, Bigsby (1969) also remarked upon the importance of singing among the voyageurs (see also Nute 1987:14–16). Bigsby (1969:134) wrote that “of such use is singing, in enabling the men to work eighteen and nineteen hours a-day (at a pinch), through forests and across great bays, that a good singer has additional pay.” In this chapter, I examine another aspect of everyday life among the voyageurs—smoking. Like singing, smoking a pipe was both a leisure activity and part of the fur trade labor process. Podruchny (2006:89) seems to imply as much when she asserts that the voyageurs “organized time in a particular way, in terms of both hours and days. Weather, tasks, daily needs, and leisure, such as pipe smoking, determined the pace of the work.” Unlike singing, however, pipe smoking has a materiality that is visible archaeologically—the ubiquitous white ball clay smoking pipes found broken and charred from use by the thousands on fur trade sites across North America. After a brief description of voyageur lifeways and an examination of fur trade labor relations, I turn to the practice of smoking and the role of “la pipe” in mediating class tensions by giving the voyageurs some control over the terms and conditions of the fur trade workplace.

Voyageur Lifeways The origins of the voyageurs can be traced to the changing nature of the fur trade during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, as the French moved to physically secure the furs and trade routes of the pays d’en haut through the establishment of a series of military posts and trading installations (see Nassaney and Martin, this volume). The pays d’en haut, literally the “Upper Country” or the land upriver from Montréal, was in fact a

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nebulously defined area that included over the course of the fur trade era the Great Lakes, the Ohio River valley, and the upper Mississippi River valley (White 1991:x). Historian Richard White (1991:x) observes that the voyageurs themselves played a role in defining the boundaries of the pays d’en haut, noting that “strictly speaking it did not begin until the voyageurs passed beyond Huronia on the eastern shore of Lake Huron.” The labor required to secure this vast region was performed largely by engagés, contracted or indentured servants. By the 1720s, large numbers of French Canadian engagés were being hired on as boatmen to transport via canoe supplies, provisions, and trade goods to posts in the pays d’en haut and to bring the furs collected there back to Montréal (Podruchny 2002). The men of this special class of engagés were called voyageurs. Daily life for the voyageurs was filled with always backbreaking and often dangerous labor. While en voyage, they loaded and unloaded freight from canoes, paddled for hours at a stretch, ran dangerous rapids with great skill, and carried both freight and canoes over often difficult portage routes. Canoes of the fur brigades came in various sizes, and a typical crew probably ranged from eight to fourteen voyageurs per canoe. Status hierarchy within the canoe was based on skill, experience, and level of engagement. For example, the middlemen (milieu) or paddlers in the center of the canoe were subordinate to both the steersman (gouvernail), who stood in the stern of the canoe, and the foreman (avant, devant, or ducent), who paddled at the front of the canoe (Morse 1979:8; Nute 1987; Podruchny 2006:121–122). The elites of the fur trade—the company partners, district chiefs, and senior clerks—were known as the bourgeois in fur trade parlance. Over time the voyageurs a developed a unique lifestyle and occupational identity, with particular skills, knowledge, aptitudes, and material social practices that set them apart from other groups (see Brown 1980; Burley 1993, 1997; Hamilton 2000; Peterson 1978; Podruchny 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006). So, for example, the voyageurs wore a distinctive style of dress; engaged in distinctive secular and religious rites and rituals; preferred a particular diet; engaged in manly “rough culture” behaviors such as drinking and gambling; developed a system of oral traditions dominated by folk tales and folk songs; and created a multitude of quotidian practices associated with their labor regimen, including, as we shall see, unique smoking customs (see Hamilton 2000; Nute 1987; Podruchny 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006).

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During the French colonial period, many voyageurs could reasonably expect to rise through the company ranks, perhaps even become a bourgeois. With the coming of the British after 1763 the circumstances of the fur trade workplace came to be increasingly characterized by class tensions as “the rise of powerful monopoly (Anglo fur trade) companies ended the rise of French-speaking men to positions of influence in the trade, creating both a caste system based on ethnicity and sharp divisions of status and wealth” (Peterson 1985:42; see also Brown 1980:35; Hamilton 2000; Igartua 1974).

Fur Trade Labor Relations In the new social hierarchy envisioned by the British, French Canadian voyageurs were to become specialized laborers in an ethnically segmented fur trade labor force (Wolf 1982:194; see also Burley et al. 1992:154; Kardulias 1990; Mann 2008:321–324; Pickering 1994). Ethnic segmentation is the division of a given labor force into different branches or segments based on essentialized “sexual, ethnic, racial or national characteristics” that come to serve as “convenient markers for recruitment into particular segments” (Roseberry 1989:215). French Canadian men were cast in the role of voyageurs due to a “supposed affinity” for that particular segment of the reorganized fur trade labor market (Wolf 1982:381; see also Mann 2008:321–324). The North West Company, for example, preferred French Canadian voyageurs due to their supposedly innate ability to carry heavy loads and operate fur trade watercraft (Burley 1997). This set up an unequal relationship; “a ‘cultural division of labor’ in which cultural distinctions were ‘superimposed upon class lines’” (Burley 1993:128). Imagined ethnic traits (for example, laziness, indolence, slothfulness, vagrancy) became essentialized stereotypes in the official and private discourses that propped up and reinforced the class structure of Anglo-American fur trade companies (Burley 1993, 1997; Hamilton 2000; Mann 2008; Nassaney and Martin, this volume; Scott 2001). Thus, ethnicity became an organizing principle in the “creative struggles” that characterized fur trade labor relations following British colonial encroachment (O’Brien 1991:137; see also O’Brien 1986). In examining these struggles, we must recognize that the voyageurs had a distinctive social identity and had developed unique social practices prior to their incorporation into an Anglo-dominated

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labor force (Podruchny 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006). In fact, the ability of the French Canadians to assert some measure of control over their labor was due in large part to the fact that they developed a social identity that embraced their position as voyageurs. Although overly romanticized, Nute’s (1987:16) description of the voyageurs is illustrative; an “essential characteristic of the voyageur” is “his pride of profession.” She (Nute 1987:16) continued, explicitly linking the voyageur’s occupational identity with his class position, “He was class conscious; he considered himself favored by fortune to belong to his group.” As an example, Nute (1987:16–17) cites Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas L. McKenney’s encounter with an old voyageur on Lake Superior in 1826. McKenney wrote that although now “radically diseased,” the old voyageur told him that in his youth he “had been the greatest man in the north-west” (Nute 1987:17). Apparently the old voyageur was beaming with pride as he spoke, for McKenney went on to say that it “is questionable whether Bonaparte ever felt his superiority in all departments of mind which so distinguished him, or in his achievements, to an extent of greater excitement, than does this poor man on Michael’s island, in the animating and single belief in his supremacy as a north-western voyageur” (Nute 1987:17). In contrast, British bourgeois drew upon a long established ideology of paternalism in order to assert and legitimate their claims to power over the independent-minded French Canadians (Podruchny 1999:134–164). As archaeologist Scott Hamilton (2000) has demonstrated, the structuring hierarchy of this ideology was materially expressed by fur trade elites in the form of dress, diet, architecture, and other material social practices. Paternalism was defined by the master/servant relation. Podruchny (1999:47) succinctly captures the nature of paternalism in the fur trade labor system: “Masters tried to enforce obedience, loyalty, and hard work among voyageurs, while the voyageurs struggled to ensure that their working conditions were fair and comfortable, and that masters fully met their paternal obligations.” While the power of the bourgeois was generally expressed overtly and materially, French Canadian voyageurs often contested the authority of the bourgeois in ways characterized by James Scott (1985) as “weapons of the weak,” including pilfering, feigning illness, working slowly or inefficiently, and finally desertion (Podruchny 1999, 2006:151–164; see also Englebert 2007; St-Onge 2013). Even more subtle forms of resistance stem from what, following Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and

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Elizabeth Vibert (1997), we might call voyageur habitus—those everyday acts and actions that both derived from and molded the voyageurs’ shared social histories and practical experiences.

Paddling and Smoking: The Role of “la Pipe” en Voyage Among the ways that the voyageurs used everyday social practices to “shape the workplace to improve their lot” was a unique method of reckoning distance along fur trade canoe routes using smoking pipes (Podruchny 2006:151). A “pipe” referred to both the distance covered between rest stops, when the voyageurs could take the time to fill and light a new pipe, and to the rest stops themselves (Birk 1994:371–372; Burley et al. 1996:121; Nute 1941:54–55, 1987:50–51; Peach 1993:113). A “pipe” rest stop might last as long as ten minutes and, according to archaeologist Douglas Birk (1994:371–372), the distance of a “pipe” could be anywhere from 2 to over 6 miles depending on variables such as the wind or current (Figure 3.1). So, for instance, a lake 28 miles long might be referred to by the voyageurs as being “four pipes” long—five segments of approximately 5.6 miles (Birk 1994:371). Traveling with some French Canadian voyageurs on the Fox River in the 1830s, Juliette Kinzie (1873), wife of fur trader and the Indian subagent at Fort Winnebago, John H. Kinzie, recalled in her memoir that the “Canadian boatmen always sing while rowing or paddling”

Figure 3.1. The Voyageurs by Arthur Heming, ca. 1919. With permission of the Royal Ontario Museum ©ROM.

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and “that by the time all the different qualifications are rehearsed and objected to, lengthened out by the interminable repetition of the chorus, the shout of the bourgeois is heard—‘Whoop la! à terre, à terre—pour la pipe!’ It is an invariable custom for the voyageurs to stop every five or six miles to rest and smoke, so that it was formerly the way of measuring distances—‘so many pipes,’ instead of ‘so many miles’” (Kinzie 1873:41–42). Though brief, these respites allowed the voyageurs a chance to relax and engage in a social practice intimately linked to prevailing constructions of maleness in the French Canadian laboring classes. In fact, much like the voyageurs’ distinctive mode of dress, pipes made of both clay and stone were key material symbols of French Canadian identity (Peach 1993; Pyszczyk 1989:238–239; Waselkov 2016). Irish travel writer Isaac Weld (1799) recorded one of the best accounts of the general importance of pipes and smoking to male French Canadian identity: The exertion it requires to counteract the force of the stream by means of the poles and oars is so great, that men are obliged to stop very frequently to take breath. The places at which they stop are regularly ascertained; some of them, where the current is rapid, are not more than half a mile distant one from the other; others one or two, but none of them more than four miles apart. Each of these places the boatmen, who are almost all French Canadians, denominate “une pipe,” because they are allowed to stop at it and fill their pipes. A French Canadian is scarcely ever without a pipe in his mouth, whether working at the oar or plough; whether on foot, or on horseback; indeed, so much addicted are the people to smoking, that by the burning of the tobacco in their pipes they commonly ascertain the distance from one place to another. Such a place, they say, is three pipes off, that is, it is so far off that you may smoke three pipes full of tobacco whilst you go thither. (Weld 1799:261–262) Weld may have been referring to either white ball clay pipes or stone Micmac-style pipes, such as the one being smoked by a French Canadian farmer in Figure 3.2, which seem to have been emblematic of the ethnogenesis of a distinctive French Canadian identity (Waselkov 2016). While both stone Micmac-style pipes and white ball clay pipes are associated with French Canadian and Métis voyageurs, Peach (1993:98) suggests that stone Micmac-style pipes “functioned as an ethnic marker for the Métis during the period from 1780–1850 within the fur trade society

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Figure 3.2. Ein Canadischer Bauer (A Canadian Farmer) by Captain Friedrich Konstantin von Germann, 1778. By permission of the Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

of the Northwest” (see also Burley et al. 1996:121–123; Waselkov 2016). Stone pipes and their continued use by voyageurs and French Canadian fur traders into the nineteenth century may well represent a “degraded” or “fugitive” form of the calumet ceremony, a highly structured fur trade ritual that worked to ensure smooth relations and exchanges between members of gift economies, on the one hand, and members of a market economy, on the other (see Comer 1996:144; Mann 2004:170–173; Nassaney and Martin, this volume). Here I focus on the more ubiquitous white ball clay pipes, which seem to have been smoked in more quotidian contexts, including while en voyage paddling their birch bark canoes. The voyageurs even sang about their white clay pipes in a chanson called Parmi les Voyageurs (Among the Voyageurs), which Nute (1987:143) asserts “shows the class-consciousness of the voyageurs.” In the first verse

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the voyageurs sing “Among the voyageurs, there are some fine fellows, who seldom eat but often drink. Pipe in mouth, glass in hand, we say, ‘Comrades, pour me some wine’” (Nute 1987:143). By the time of British ascendancy in the fur trade, the practice of pipe rest stops and of reckoning distances by pipes had become a mundane part of voyageur habitus. Thus, North West Company clerk John Macdonell described arriving at Grand Portage in 1793 with a brigade of voyageurs from Montréal: “Leaving point au pere we paddled two pipes and put to shore to give the men time to clean themselves, while we breakfasted—this done a short pipe brought us to Point au Chapeaux around which we got a sight of the long wished for Grand Portage. The beach was covered with spectators to see us arrive, our canoe went well and the crew sang paddling songs in a vociferous manner” (Gates 1933:92). By the 1830s, the association of voyageurs and clay pipes was becoming romanticized by Anglo-Americans such that images of the voyageurs frequently show at least one of their number smoking a pipe (Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Similarly, “frontier artist” George Winter encountered an old French Canadian voyageur while on a canal boat in Indiana in 1839 (Figure 3.5). Winter wrote in his journal that “Captn. Bygosh,” as he was known due to his “profuse use of the exclamatory phrase of ‘bygosh,’” was a pleasant traveling companion and that “Incessant smoking was a peculiar enjoyment of his . . . with his short clay pipe between his lips—occasionally puffing out clouds of blue smoke . . . helped to make a face, deep

Figure 3.3. Canoe manned by voyageurs passing a waterfall by Frances Anne Hopkins, 1869. Library and Archives Canada/Frances Anne Hopkins fonds/e011153912.

Figure 3.4. Hudson’s Bay Company Men in an Express Canoe by Peter Rindisbacher, 1825. Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. R9266-346 Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana.

Figure 3.5. Captain By-Gosh by George Winter, 1839. Courtesy of Tippecanoe County Historical Association, Lafayette, Indiana.

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seated in lines, a picturesque object” (Cooke and Ramadhyani 1993:109; for more on Winter’s “frontier” art, see Mann 2007). These images as well as the romanticized accounts of voyageurs in the writings of some EuroAmericans such as Bigsby, Kinzie, and Kohl are a continuation of the essentializing discourse created by Anglo-American fur trade elites to keep French Canadian voyageurs in subordinate positions within the fur trade labor hierarchy. Elsewhere I (Mann 2008:327) have stressed that we must be careful not to fall prey to the power of these discourses and must resist the temptation to simply relegate the material symbols of French Canadian fur trade/ occupational identity to the role of “ethnic markers” (e.g., Peach 1993; Stone 1974:145–151). For although they certainly functioned as such in certain contexts, they were also the objectification of the class relations that voyageurs were embedded within after 1763. Like the construction of French Canadian vernacular housing, the practice of pipe breaks and of reckoning distances by pipes should not be thought of as static, unchanging folk traditions (Mann 2008). Nor were the voyageurs’ smoking practices reproduced in a historical vacuum. The social and political upheaval brought about by the British takeover of the fur trade was accompanied by class tensions and conflict. French Canadians found themselves increasingly marginalized as the British owners of the large fur trade companies worked by deed and discourse to establish a new hegemonic order based on a more rigidly defined class hierarchy. As noted, British hegemony was grounded in a long-established European system of paternalism, and while the voyageurs could and did “challenge the substance and boundaries of their jobs to improve their working conditions,” Podruchny (2006:136) contends that “it was outside their conception of the world to challenge the system of paternalism.” The continuation of some quotidian practices, such as pipe smoking, must be viewed in light of these politicaleconomic dynamics. The voyageurs had over the course of the formation of their occupational identity inserted a social practice typically associated with leisure directly into the labor process. By retaining the practice of pipe breaks and of using pipes to reckon distances, the voyageurs maintained some measure of control over their labor even as British bourgeois used such traits to characterize the voyageurs as “lazy” and “indolent,” thereby legitimating their own claims to status and power. The tensions surrounding this

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practice are evident in Hudson’s Bay Company bourgeois George Sutherland’s assessment of French Canadian voyageurs in 1779. In keeping with the essentializing discourse of ethnic segmentation, he first acknowledged that the French Canadians were “very clever in the falls” and capable of carrying “very heavy loads,” but also declared, “Never did I see such a parcel of lazey fellows as these frenchmen are and they are fit to Eat the divel and smoak his mother for they must stop and smoak and Eat at Every miels End” (quoted in Burley 1997:75–76). I argue that the production and reproduction of the smoking practices of the voyageurs under a paternalistic ideology that equated those practices with laziness and indolence, powerful capitalist tropes that could have social and material ramifications for the voyageurs, were part of a larger effort to assert their claims to a particular political-economic position within an ethnically segmented fur trade labor market. Seemingly innocuous white clay pipes were the material means by which the voyageurs politicized what may have previously been a taken-for-granted aspect of their daily work regimen. Writing in regard to his attempt in 1797 to help establish portions of the boundary between the United States and Canada, renowned fur trader and explorer David Thompson noted that at the end of each “pipe” traveled the voyageurs “claimed a right to rest and smoke a pipe” (Glover 1962:202, emphasis added).

Movement, Mobility, and Fur Trade Archaeology Recently anthropologists and archaeologists have been turning (or returning) to the concepts of movement and mobility as fruitful avenues of inquiry (e.g., Beaudry and Parno 2013; Pendery, this volume; Ingold 2011; van Dommelen 2014). Ingold (2011:12), for instance, sees movement as fundamental to understanding how humans (and nonhumans for that matter) “make their ways in the world.” Movement in this sense is “not casting about the hard surfaces of a world in which everything is already laid out, but an issuing along with things in the very processes of their generation” (Ingold 2011:12, emphasis added). For Ingold (2011:12–13), then, “wayfaring is the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth.” Although he intends to apply it much more broadly, Ingold’s (2011:149–150) concept of wayfaring seems particularly apropos to the voyageurs. Wayfarers are, Ingold (2011) contends,

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continually on the move. More strictly he is his movement . . . the wayfarer is instantiated in the world as a line of travel. It is a line that advances from the tip as he presses on, in an ongoing process of growth and development, or self-renewal. As he proceeds, however, the wayfarer has to sustain himself, both perceptually and materially, through an active engagement with the country that opens up along his path. Though from time to time he must pause for rest, and even return repeatedly to the same place to do so, each pause is a moment of tension that—like holding one’s breath—becomes ever more intense and less sustainable the longer it lasts. Indeed the wayfarer has no final destination, for wherever he is, and so long as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go. (Ingold 2011:150) In this same vein, Beaudry and Parno (2013) draw archaeologists’ attention to the possibility of an archaeology of mobility and movement (see also Pendery, this volume, and the contributions in van Dommelen, ed. 2014). Such an archaeology should be concerned “with the hybridity of people and things, affordances of objects and spaces . . . and the effects of movement on archaeological subjects” (Beaudry and Parno 2013:12). Importantly, Beaudry and Parno (2013:5) recognize that any study of human movement must acknowledge “that mobility is implicated in the production and reproduction of power relations,” and they further contend that “movement itself ” can and should be an object of archaeological inquiry. The French Canadian voyageurs, who by their physical labor moved goods and people across much of the North American landscape, were nothing if not mobile. Given the fluid, literally and figuratively, nature of the much of the voyageurs’ workplace, artifacts directly associated with them while en voyage can only be recovered from rather limited archaeological contexts. One important primary context for archaeological data directly associated with the voyageurs’ “workplace” are underwater contexts, such as those reported in the now classic volume Voices from the Rapids: An Underwater Search for Fur Trade Artifacts, 1960–1973 (Wheeler et al. 1975). The Quetico-Superior Underwater Research Project did, in fact, find “countless” white clay pipes over the course of the study. For instance, at Horsetail Rapids on the Granite River in northeast Minnesota, along the “Voyageurs’ Highway” route between Grand Portage and Rainy Lake, divers found a single unbroken white clay pipe near a bundle

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of approximately thirty iron files and a bundle of twelve wooden knife handles (Wheeler et al. 1975:61–63). The files and knife handles almost certainly represent a portion of the cargo of a canoe laden with trade goods. The solitary pipe may represent the loss of an unfortunate voyageur paddling the ill-fated canoe. As Doug Birk (1994:370–371) has pointed out, artifacts directly related to the working life of the voyageurs may also be found at temporary resting spots or camp sites along overland portage routes known as posés, or pauses. Johann Kohl (1985), the German travel writer and ethnographer who encountered several French Canadian voyageurs on Lake Superior in 1855, described these spots as “little stations or resting-places along their savage paths in the forests, where they are wont to rest a moment from their fatiguing journey. They call such resting-places ‘des poses’ probably because they lay off, or ‘posent’ their burdens there for a short time” (Kohl 1985:59). While not required on short portages (typically those less than a halfmile in length), longer portages were divided into segments of varying lengths depending on terrain and other factors (Birk 1994:370). Much like a “pipe” on the water, a posé “also came to be used as a measure of the distance between resting places and, thus, of the overall length or relative difficulty of portages” (Birk 1994:370). Recent archaeological surveys of the renowned “Grand Portage,” which linked Lake Superior to the Pigeon River and hence to the interior of North America, have found archaeological traces at several of the at least sixteen posés traditionally known to have been located along the 8.5-mile portage route (Birk 2007; Birk and Cooper 2010). The Grand Portage surveys utilized a metal detecting methodology, which clearly biased the recovery of nonmetallic artifacts (Birk 2007:14–15; Birk and Cooper 2010:83). Still, white clay pipe fragments were recovered from three separate posés along the Grand Portage (Birk and Cooper 2010:83). More extensive archaeological investigations have taken place at the Savanna Portage, a 6-mile-long dry land route linking the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi River that was heavily used during the fur trade era (Gibbon 2006). Archaeologist Guy Gibbon surveyed the Savanna Portage route and conducted test excavations along the portage trail and at three of the at least thirteen posés along the portage. White clay pipes were recovered from two of the thirteen posés along the portage. Posé number 1, the westernmost posé, was apparently “the major stopping place when

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Figure 3.6. White clay pipes recovered from the Savanna Portage. Courtesy of the Minnesota Archaeological Society.

the portage was crossed,” and seventy-four white clay pipe fragments were found here, including a well-used (as indicated by charring) “TD” pipe (Figure 3.6). The two small white clay pipe stem fragments found at posé 5 may represent a pipe lost or discarded by a voyageur crossing the portage.

Conclusion While underwater and portage route fur trade archaeological contexts remain relatively rare, white clay pipes are among the most common artifacts found on terrestrial sites of the fur trade era. As just one example, excavations at Fort Michilimackinac between 1959 and 1966 recovered 5,328 white clay pipe fragments (Stone 1974:145), and as excavations have continued since 1966, that total has grown to 11,527 (Lynn Evans, personal communication 2014). Although many of these pipes were likely smoked by voyageurs, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine a direct association between these pipes and the voyageurs. As at other fur trade posts and forts, Michilimackinac was spatially segregated along class and ethnic lines such that most voyageurs probably encamped outside of the fort’s walls while there (Lynn Evans, personal communication 2014; see also Hamilton 2000; Scott 2001). This should not preclude us, however, from attempting to ascertain a more nuanced understanding of the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of the smoking practices at fur trade sites such as Michilimackinac. At the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver, for instance, Wynia (2013) undertook a study of the distribution of smoking pipes in the “Village,” the spatially and socially distinct area

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where the laboring class inhabitants of Fort Vancouver resided. The “Village” was home to French Canadian, Native Hawaiian, Iroquoian, and Orcadian voyageurs, among various other European and Native American ethnic groups (Wynia 2013:9–10). Although Wynia’s (2013) research was ultimately unable to detect any “evidence of ethnic variation in tobacco consumption” among the occupants of the “Village” that allows us to isolate the smoking pipes of French Canadian voyageurs, her study is noteworthy in its attempt to discern distinctions in tobacco use and smoking practices along ethnic, class, and gender lines. White clay pipes were inexpensive, essentially disposable objects. They were easily broken or lost and easily replaced. Due to their ubiquity and the historical vagaries of their production, white clay pipes are often valued by archaeologists as sensitive temporal markers (e.g., Binford 1962; Harrington 1954; Heighton and Deagan 1971; Mallios 2005; Shott 2012; Wesler 2014). But this does not mean that white clay pipes are any less socially constitutive than any other aspect of a group’s material culture (e.g., Beaudry et al. 1991:167–168; Cook 1989; Dallal 2004; Fox 2015; Mann 2004; Mehler 2009; Rafferty and Mann 2004; Reckner 2004; Wynia 2013). As a class of artifacts, white clay pipes can potentially provide us with insights into the social relations of the fur trade. Archaeologists such as Heinz Pyszczyk (1989), for example, have clearly demonstrated that white clay pipes were a key symbol of French Canadian voyageur identity, helping to materially distinguish them from other fur trade laborers. Still, white clay pipes are typically classified as personal leisure or recreation items because they are most commonly found at the fur trade forts and posts that were the voyageurs’ primary residences while in the interior. Such classifications are based on functional categories that are underpinned by a rather static view of material culture that tends to preclude other possible interpretations. Therefore, we must be careful not to overly essentialize white clay pipes merely as “ethnic markers” of the voyageur identity system. As Arjun Appadurai (1986) pointed out thirty years ago, material objects have a “social life,” and the particular meanings attached to objects often change depending on the social context of their use. Archaeologists working on fur trade sites must recognize the difficulty in drawing concrete spatial and conceptual boundaries around the “workplace” and in clearly delimiting what constitutes labor and/or leisure in the liminal world of the North

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American fur trade. Thus, some of the clay pipes found charred and broken at voyageur residences at interior posts and forts were likely the same ones they used to set the pace and ease the strain of their labor while en voyage. Clearly, “une pipe” was more than simply a “ubiquitous component of relaxation” among the French Canadian voyageurs (see Trubowitz 1992:107). The continuation of the practice of correlating pipes with rest stops and as a method of reckoning distances should not be mistaken as “resistance to change” by members of a folk culture mired in seemingly timeless traditions that left them culturally incapable of coping with the changing political-economic dynamics of the fur trade. Such a view simply reproduces the dominant discourses of ethnic segmentation used by fur trade elites to marginalize fur trade laborers and justify their own hegemonic aspirations. Rather, it is precisely the continuation of these traditions under such conditions that requires an explanation (Pauketat 2001). An archaeology of daily practice and traditions that focuses on material social processes rather than functional behaviors allows us to acknowledge the fluid and liminal world of the voyageurs and move beyond the static dichotomies of workplace/residence and labor/leisure. This in turn allows us to see that once enmeshed within the daily negotiated tensions between British masters and French Canadian servants, white clay pipes and the smoking practices of the voyageurs played active roles in the class struggle over the terms and conditions of fur trade labor processes.

Acknowledgments This chapter began as a paper presented in a Society for American Archaeology conference symposium entitled “Working It: Archaeological Approaches to Labor, Leisure, and Place.” I would like to thank my coorganizers of that symposium, Eric Drake and Paul Reckner, for their critical feedback on the original presentation. I would like to thank our discussant for that session, Reinhard Bernbeck, for his comments. Over the years I have presented different versions of this chapter, and I have benefited greatly from discussions with Amélie Allard, Doug Birk, Jim Cummings, Kat Hayes, and David Mather. Thanks also to Elizabeth Scott for including my chapter in this volume, even though it was not the contribution that was part of her Society for Historical Archaeology conference

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symposium that was the genesis of this volume. Finally, I would like to thank Greg Waselkov and one anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions for this chapter.

Note 1. “Where do I live? I cannot tell you. I am a Voyageur-I am Chicot, sir. I live everywhere. My grandfather was a Voyageur: he died in voyage. My father was a Voyageur: he died in voyage. I will also die in voyage, and another Chicot will take my place” (my translation). The term “Chicot” is interesting. It refers to a stump of wood and has been associated with the term “bois-brûlé” (burned wood), both thought to denote people of mixed European (mostly French) and Native American ancestry (Peterson 2012:42). According to Peterson (2012:42), however, the assumption that “Chicot” meant of mixed ancestry can be traced back to Kohl, who may have misunderstood the term. Incidentally, “Chicot” is also a variant spelling of the French Canadian family name Chiquot (also spelled Cicott, Cicotte, and Chicotte). The Chiquot family was heavily involved in the Great Lakes fur trade, especially around Detroit and the Wabash River valley in Indiana (see Mann 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008).

References Cited Appadurai, Arjun 1986 Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Barbeau, Marius 1954 The Ermatinger Collection of Voyageur Songs (ca. 1830). Journal of American Folklore 67(264):147–161. Beaudry, Mary C., and Travis G. Parno, eds. 2013 Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement. Springer, New York. Beaudry, Mary C., Lauren J. Cook, and Stephen A. Mrozowski 1991 Artifacts and Active Voices: Material Culture as Social Discourse. In The Archaeology of Inequality, edited by Randall H. McGuire and Robert Paynter, 150–191. Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Bieder, Robert E. 1985 Introduction. In Kichi-Gami: Life among the Lake Superior Ojibway, by Johann Georg Kohl, xiii–xxxix. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul. Bigsby, John J. 1969 [1850] The Shoe and the Canoe or Pictures of Travel in the Canadas. 2 vols. Paladin Press, New York. Binford, Lewis R. 1962 A New Method of Calculating Dates from Kaolin Pipe Stem Samples. Southeastern Archaeological Conference Newsletter 9(1):19–21.

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Birk, Douglas A. 1994 When Rivers Were Roads: Deciphering the Role of Canoe Portages in the Western Lake Superior Fur Trade. In The Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference, Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1991, edited by Jennifer S. H. Brown, W. J. Eccles, and Donald P. Heldman, 359–375. Michigan State University Press and Mackinac State Historic Parks, East Lansing and Mackinac Island, Mich. 2007 On the Trail of Untold Stories: Archaeological Inquiries Along the Old Grand Portage. Minnesota Archaeologist 66:9–20. Birk, Douglas A., and David J. Cooper 2010 Grand Portage National Monument: Grand Portage Trail Survey, 2005–2008 Report. Submitted to the National Park Service, Grand Portage National Monument. Copies available from Grand Portage National Monument, Grand Portage, Minn. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Brown, Jennifer S. H. 1980 Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Burley, David V., J. Scott Hamilton, and Knut R. Fladmark 1996 Prophecy of the Swan: The Upper Peace River Fur Trade of 1794–1823. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Burley, David V., Gayle Horsfall, and John Brandon 1992 Structural Considerations of Métis Ethnicity: An Archaeological, Architectural and Historical Study. University of South Dakota Press, Vermillion. Burley, Edith 1993 Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770–1870. Ph.D. diss., University of Manitoba. 1997 Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770–1870. Oxford University Press, Toronto. Comer, Douglas C. 1996 Ritual Ground: Bent’s Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest. University of California Press, Berkeley. Cook, Lauren J. 1989 Tobacco-Related Material and Construction of Working-Class Culture. In Interdisciplinary Investigations of the Boot Mills, Lowell Massachusetts. Vol. 3, The Boarding House System as a Way of Life, edited by Mary C. Beaudry and Stephen A. Mrozowski, 209–230. Cultural Resources Management Study No. 21. North Atlantic Regional Office, National Park Service, Boston. Cooke, Sarah E., and Rachel B. Ramadhyani, comps. 1993 Indians and a Changing Frontier: The Art of George Winter. Indiana Historical Society in cooperation with the Tippecanoe County Historical Association, Indianapolis.

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Dallal, Diane 2004 The Tudor Rose and the Fleurs-de-lis: Women and Iconography in Seventeenth Century Dutch Clay Pipes Found in New York City. In Smoking and Culture: The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America, edited by Sean M. Rafferty and Rob Mann, 207–239. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Englebert, Robert 2007 Diverging Identities and Converging Interests: Corporate Competition, Desertion, and Voyageur Agency, 1815–1818. Manitoba History 55:18–24. Fox, Georgia L. 2015 The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Gates, Charles M., ed. 1933 Five Fur Traders of the Northwest: Being the Narrative of Peter Pond and Diaries of John Macdonell, Archibald N. McLeod, Hugh Faries, and Thomas Connor. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Gibbon, Guy 2006 The Savanna Portage: An Archaeological Study. Minnesota Archaeologist 65:9–29. Glover, Richard, ed. 1962 David Thompson’s Narrative 1784–1812: A New Edition with Added Material. Champlain Society, Toronto. Hamilton, Scott 2000 Dynamics of Social Complexity in Early 19th Century British Fur Trade Posts. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 4(3):217–273. Harrington, J. C. 1954 Dating Stem Fragments of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Clay Tobacco Pipes. Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia 9(1):10–14. Heighton, Robert F., and Kathleen A. Deagan 1971 A New Formula for Dating Kaolin Clay Pipestems. Conference on Historic Sites Archaeology Papers 6:220–229. Igartua, José 1974 A Change in the Climate: The Conquest and the Marchands of Montreal. Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers 9(1):115–134. Ingold, Tim 2011 Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge, New York. Kardulias, P. Nick 1990 Fur Production as a Specialized Activity in a World System: Indians in the North American Fur Trade. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 14(1):25–60. Kinzie, Mrs. John H. (Juliette) 1873 Wau-bun: The Early Day in the Northwest. J. B. Lippencott, Philadelphia.

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Kohl, Johann Georg 1985 Kichi-Gami: Life among the Lake Superior Ojibway. Translated by Lascelles Wraxall. Introduction by Robert E. Bieder. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul. Mallios, Seth 2005 Back to the Bowl: Using English Tobacco Pipes to Calculate Mean Site Occupation Dates. Historical Archaeology 39(2):89–104. Mann, Rob 2003 Colonizing the Colonizers: Canadien Fur Traders and Fur Trade Society in the Great Lakes Region, 1763–1850. Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University (SUNY). 2004 Smokescreens: Tobacco, Pipes and the Transformational Power of Fur Trade Rituals. In Smoking and Culture: The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America, edited by Sean M. Rafferty and Rob Mann, 165–183. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. 2007 “True Portraitures of the Indians, and of Their Own Peculiar Conceits of Dress”: Discourses of Dress and Identity in the Great Lakes, 1830–1850. In Between Art and Artifact, Diana DiPaolo Loren and Uzi Baram, guest editors. Historical Archaeology 41(1):37–52. 2008 From Ethnogenesis to Ethnic Segmentation in the Wabash Valley: Constructing Identity and Houses in Great Lakes Fur Trade Society. In The Archaeology of French Colonial and Post-Colonial Settlements, Elizabeth M. Scott, guest editor. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12(4):319– 337. Mehler, Natascha 2009 The Archaeology of Mercantilism: Clay Tobacco Pipes in Bavaria and Their Contribution to an Economic System. Post-Medieval Archaeology 43(2):261– 281. Morse, Eric W. 1979 Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada: Then and Now. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld 2000 A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Naum, Magdalena 2013 The Malady of Emigrants: Homesickness and Longing in the Colony of New Sweden (1638–1655). In Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement, edited by Mary C. Beaudry and Travis G. Parno, 165–177. Springer, New York. Nute, Grace Lee 1941 The Voyageur’s Highway: Minnesota’s Border Lake Land. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul. 1987 [1931] The Voyageur. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul.

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O’Brien, Jay 1986 Toward a Reconstruction of Ethnicity: Capitalist Expansion and Cultural Dynamics in Sudan. American Anthropologist 88:898–907. 1991 Toward a Reconstitution of Ethnicity: Capitalist Expansion and Cultural Dynamics in Sudan. In Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History, edited by Jay O’Brien and William Roseberry, 126–138. University of California Press, Berkeley. Pauketat, Timothy R. 2001 Practice and History in Archaeology: An Emerging Paradigm. Anthropological Theory 1:73–98. Peach, A. Kate 1993 Ethnicity and Ethnic Markers: A Fur Trade Example. Manitoba Archaeological Journal 3(1–2):97–124. Peterson, Jacqueline 1978 Prelude to Red River: A Social Portrait of the Great Lakes Métis. Ethnohistory 25(1):41–67. 1985 Many Roads to Red River: Métis Genesis in the Great Lakes Region, 1680– 1815. In The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, edited by Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, 37–71. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg. 2012 Red River Redux: Ethnogenesis and the Great Lakes Region. In Contours of a People: Metis Family, History, and Mobility, edited by Nicole St-Onge, Carolyn Podrunchny, and Brenda Macdougall, 22–58. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Pickering, Kathleen 1994 Articulation of the Lakota Mode of Production and the Euro-American Fur Trade. In The Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference, Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1991, edited by Jennifer S. H. Brown, W. J. Eccles, and Donald P. Heldman, 57–69. Michigan State University Press and Mackinac State Historic Parks, East Lansing and Mackinac Island, Mich. Podruchny, Carolyn 1999 Unfair Masters and Rascally Servants? Labour Relations among Bourgeois, Clerks and Voyageurs in the Montréal Fur Trade, 1780–1821. Labour/Le Travail: Journal of Canadian Labour Studies 43:43–70. 2000 Dieu, Diable and the Trickster: Voyageur Religious Syncretism in the Pays d’en Haut, 1770–1821. In Western Oblate Studies 5. Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on the History of the Oblates in Western and Northern Canada, edited by Raymond Huel and Gilles Lesage, 75–92. Presses Universitaires de Saint-Boniface, Winnipeg. 2002 Baptizing Novices: Ritual Moments among the French Canadian Voyageurs in the Montreal Fur Trade, 1780–1821. Canadian Historical Review 83(2):165– 195.

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Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Pyszczyk, Heinz W. 1989 Consumption and Ethnicity: An Example from the Fur Trade in Western Canada. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 8(3):213–249. Rafferty, Sean M., and Rob Mann, eds. 2004 Smoking and Culture: The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Reckner, Paul 2004 Home Rulers, Red Hands, and Radical Journalists: Clay Pipes and the Negotiation of Working-Class Irish/Irish American Identity in Late-NineteenthCentury Paterson, New Jersey. In Smoking and Culture: The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America, edited by Sean M. Rafferty and Rob Mann, 241–271. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Roseberry, William 1989 Anthropologies and Histories. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J. Scott, Elizabeth M. 2001 “An Indolent Slothful Set of Vagabonds”: Ethnicity and Race in a Colonial Fur Trading Community. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser Jr., 14–33. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Scott, James C. 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. Shott, Michael J. 2012 Toward Settlement Occupation Span from Dispersion of Tobacco-Pipe Stem Bore Diameter Values. Historical Archaeology 46(2):16–38. St-Onge, Nicole 2008 The Persistence of Travel and Trade: St. Lawrence River Valley French Engagés and the American Fur Company, 1818–1840. Michigan Historical Review 34(2):17–37. 2013 Blue Beads, Vermilion, and Scalpers: The Social Economy of the 1810–1812 Astorian Overland Expedition’s French Canadian Voyageurs. In French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, edited by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, 183–216. Michigan State University Press and University of Manitoba Press, East Lansing and Winnipeg. Stone, Lyle M. 1974 Fort Michilimackinac 1715–1781: An Archaeological Perspective on the Revolutionary Frontier. Publications of the Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Trubowitz, Neal L. 1992 Thanks But We Prefer to Smoke Our Own: Pipes in the Great Lakes–Riverine Region during the Eighteenth Century. In Proceedings of the 1989 Smoking Pipe Conference, edited by Charles F. Hayes III, Research Records No. 22, 97–112. Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, N.Y. 2006

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van Dommelen, Peter 2014 Moving On: Archaeological Perspectives on Mobility and Migration. World Archaeology 46(4):477–483. van Dommelen, Peter, ed. 2014 Mobility and Migration. World Archaeology 46(4). Vibert, Elizabeth 1997 Trader’s Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807–1846. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Waselkov, Gregory A. 2016 Smoking Pipes as Signifiers of French Creole Identity. In Tu Sais mon vieux Jean-Pierre: Essays on the Archaeology and History of New France and Canadian Culture in Honour of Jean-Pierre Chrestien, edited by John Willis. Mercury Series, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa. Weld, Isaac 1799 Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797. John Stockdale, London. Wesler, Kit 2014 Assessing Precision in Formula Dating. Historical Archaeology 48(2):173– 181. Wheeler, Robert C., Walter A. Kenyon, Alan R. Woolworth, and Douglas A. Birk 1975 Voices from the Rapids: An Underwater Search for Fur Trade Artifacts, 1960– 1973. Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. White, Richard 1991 The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wolf, Eric R. 1982 Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley. Wynia, Katie Ann 2013 The Spatial Distribution of Tobacco Pipe Fragments at the Hudson’s Bay Company Fort Vancouver Village Site: Smoking as a Shared and Social Practice. Master’s thesis, Portland State University. Young, Rob 2013 “Jowl, Jowl and Listen Lad”: Vernacular Song and Industrial Archaeology of Coal Mining in Northern England. Historical Archaeology 48(1):60–70.

4 Food and Furs at French Fort St. Joseph Michael S. Nassaney and Terrance J. Martin

A recurrent aspect of the North American colonial enterprise was the effort of would-be colonizers to impose foreign practices and beliefs on indigenous peoples (see, e.g., Gosden 2004; Jordan 2009; Rothschild 2003). Europeans attempted and sometimes succeeded in reproducing familiar economic, political, and social relations in unfamiliar surroundings (Loren 2008). Their presence and attendant activities had widespread consequences for the people they encountered. Yet English, Dutch, Spanish, and French imperial motives and aspirations were by no means homogeneous and led to a wide array of divergent cultural patterns that reflect the ways in which colonialism articulated with local conditions (Nassaney 2015:32–34). Mercantilism was central to most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European economies that sought to obtain relatively cheap raw materials, resources, and labor in exchange for finished goods. However, not all economic relations required the same labor formations in order to realize a profit. The fur trade, for example, was one exchange system that benefited particularly the French, yet it “did not necessarily require extensive colonization by whites” (Paterson 2011:181). Conducted over an enormous region from Acadia to the Missouri River valley and beyond beginning in the sixteenth century, the French fur trade initially relied on Native producers to bring their furs to Montréal. By the late seventeenth century, the French initiated a policy of westward expansion to establish small settlements that served as missions, garrisons, and economic centers for the collection of furs (Nassaney 2015:41–52). The western Great Lakes region was actively involved in the fur trade from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries (Nassaney 2015). Fort

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Figure 4.1. The western Great Lakes region showing the locations of Fort St. Joseph and contemporaneous sites. Map ©Jan Underwood, Information Illustrated, 6336 NE Garfield Ave., Portland, OR 97211.

St. Joseph (20BE23) was among the sites that played a role in the extraction, processing, and trading of hides in exchange for imported goods (Peyser 1978). The site functioned as a local fortified trading post and mission in southwest Michigan for a small French military garrison, priest, blacksmith, and traders who resided at the fort and maintained close commercial ties with the local Miami and Potawatomi groups who lived nearby (Figure 4.1). Archaeological investigations of Francophone settlements on the edge of empire provide the opportunity to examine the persistence and change in French cultural practices among populations who were miles

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and sometimes generations removed from their ancestral homeland. Excavations at Fort St. Joseph demonstrate convincingly the importance of wild animal species to the fort’s economy since their skeletal remains are abundant and have been encountered in refuse deposits in all areas of the site that have been examined to date. The types of species represented, elements found, patterns of breakage, and associations with fur-processing tools and features suggest that the faunal remains are indicative of both the procurement of animals for their hides and the consumption of meat for human subsistence. Closer analysis of these fragmentary skeletal remains can suggest the cultural and natural formation processes that contributed to their deposition. Fragmentation may be the result of trampling and scavenging by dogs or other carnivores. However, breakage patterns appear to be more consistent with intentional acts to extract fatty substances such as marrow, grease, and brains for consumption and/or use in the hide-tanning process. Because Fort St. Joseph was occupied almost continuously for approximately ninety years, any or all of these activities could have occurred at the site. Such quandaries are not unique to Fort St. Joseph. Similar robust faunal assemblages have been encountered elsewhere, such as the central Wabash Valley of Indiana (Fort Ouiatenon [Noble 1983, 1991; Martin 1986; Tordoff 1983]) and the Illinois Country (for example, the Laurens site [Jelks et al. 1989; Mazrim 2011:195–207] and the Duckhouse site [Martin 2010; Mazrim 2011:81–120]). The purpose of this chapter is to infer the activities represented by the plentiful, well-preserved animal remains that are recovered at French sites such as Fort St. Joseph. Historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and ethnoarchaeological sources offer some possible analogs to help interpret the high density of both large and small animal bone fragments that regularly occur in sheet middens and refuse deposits at the site. These remains can provide comparative data to interpret faunal assemblages at other fur trade sites and offer a new perspective on the hybrid practices that emerged in the context of daily life in French colonial fur trade societies in the midwestern United States.

History and Archaeology of Fort St. Joseph The St. Joseph River valley played a strategic role in French aspirations for the pays d’en haut (Upper Country) and consequently has attracted

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considerable historical interest (e.g., Ballard 1973; Beeson 1900; Coolidge 1915; Cunningham 1961; Idle 2003; Peyser 1978, 1992). Historians have used oral traditions and documentary sources such as letters, official correspondence, maps, vouchers, and a marriage and baptismal register to provide data on Native peoples and the importance of Fort St. Joseph in the history of New France (e.g., see Brandão and Nassaney 2006; Clifton 1977). Sources suggest that the Potawatomis had moved into western Lower Michigan following their separation from their Ojibwe and Ottawa kin at the Straits of Mackinac sometime before the seventeenth century (Clifton 1977, 1986; Nassaney et al. 2012:58). Once established in their new homeland, they adopted a mixed economic strategy that included wild plant and animal foods along with maize agriculture. Sometime in the early seventeenth century, the Potawatomis abandoned their homeland and moved to northeastern Wisconsin. Rock Island, located in Door County, Wisconsin, appears to represent one of several refugee centers brought about by the domino effect of Iroquoian incursions or perceived threats (Mason 1986). It was in multiethnic communities like the village on Rock Island that the underlying premise of alliance—mediation as a source of influence—emerged, perhaps accompanied by the spread of the calumet, a smoking pipe ritual used in intercultural negotiations. The Miamis moved into southwest Michigan from LaSalle’s Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River in the 1680s, possibly at the insistence of the Jesuit missionary Father Claude Allouez (Myers and Peyser 1991:12). In 1695, the vanguard of a Potawatomi expansion from their refuge in northeastern Wisconsin, numbering 200 strong, relocated to the “River of the Miamis” as it was then known to the French; they soon became the dominant force in the valley (Nassaney et al. 2012:60). A 1736 census listed 100 Potawatomis, ten Miamis, and eight Illinois Kaskaskias for the area (Idle 2003:92). The English surveyor Thomas Hutchins (1762) documented the presence of 200 Potawatomi men immediately across the river from Fort St. Joseph (Figure 4.2). Their proximity to the fort suggests amicable relations with the French. For most of the eighteenth century, the Potawatomis would occupy the entire lower valley, from the river’s mouth to just above present-day South Bend, Indiana. Though their population would gradually decline, there were still 790 Potawatomis in six semipermanent villages along the river in 1819. Their numbers were only surpassed by

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Figure 4.2. Adaptation of a map by Thomas Hutchins (1778) based on his 1762 visit to Fort St. Joseph showing the correct location of the fort and 200 Potawatomi men immediately across the river. Courtesy of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project.

the Euro-Americans a decade later when government treaties made land available to white settlers. The French recognized the importance of the St. Joseph River valley after LaSalle built the failed Fort Miami (1679) at the mouth of the river as he awaited the arrival of the ill-fated Griffon that had departed from Green Bay. In 1686, the Jesuits were granted a tract of land upriver to establish a mission, and in 1691 a garrison and trading post were constructed nearby (Peyser 1992:43–46). This post “among the Miamis,” later to become Fort St. Joseph, was one of the most important frontier outposts in the North American interior (Idle 2003:11; Nassaney et al. 2003). By virtue of its strategic location, it became a key French settlement in the southern Lake Michigan region and served as a hub of commercial, military, and religious activity for local Native American populations and European colonial powers for nearly a century (Brandão and Nassaney 2006).

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This mission–garrison–trading-post complex, which was given the name “St. Joseph” in honor of the patron saint of New France, initially consisted of a palisade, a commandant’s house, and a few other structures (Faribault-Beauregard 1982:175). Governor General Frontenac of New France established it in an attempt to solidify French relations with the local Native groups, stimulate the fur trade in the region, and check the expansion and power of the Five Nations Iroquois Confederacy and its English allies (Brandão 1997; Eccles 1969, 1972; Myers and Peyser 1991). Once the French established Fort St. Joseph, the area again became home to various Native groups, with populations numbering in the hundreds by the early eighteenth century. The fort soon supported eight officers including a commandant, ten enlisted men, a priest, an interpreter, a blacksmith, about fifteen fur traders, and their French, French-Canadian, and Native wives and children (Idle 2003; Peyser 1978:44). For decades the site was the locus of a multiethnic population with French/French-Canadian and Native intermarriage and intense cultural interaction leading to métissage—hybridized practices and cross-cultural borrowing (Nassaney 2008; see also Turgeon et al. 1996). Jesuit priests baptized both Native women and their mixed-heritage offspring, and Native women served as godmothers, testifying to the sincerity of their beliefs and their full integration into the life of the community (Nassaney et al. 2012:69). Despite its religious origins, the French establishment on the St. Joseph River was known primarily for its commercial and military functions. It afforded a vital link in the colony’s communications network and played a major role in the exchange of manufactured commodities for furs obtained by the Natives. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it ranked fourth among all of New France’s posts in terms of volume of furs traded (Heidenreich and Noël 1987). Despite a glut of beaver furs in the late seventeenth century, the French continued to maintain and support Fort St. Joseph by accepting devalued furs in exchange for imported goods, effectively underwriting the fur trade at an economic loss to maintain their Native allies’ loyalty. The French also provided the services of a blacksmith to repair guns, to discourage the Indians from shifting their allegiance to the English (Eccles 1988:328; Nassaney et al. 2012:67–68). Documentary sources provide information on the types of imported goods that were supplied to the Natives from which we can infer related activities (Peyser 1978). Joseph Peyser (1978) translated a number

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of French-language manuscripts pertaining to Fort St. Joseph from the 1730s and 1740s that describe goods and services provided by merchants to Natives and others conducting official business for the Crown (Peyser 1978:86). Among these are vouchers that list goods and services associated with the capture and processing of fur-bearing animals. For example, Fort St. Joseph merchants Louis Hamelin and Louis Gastineau (Gatineau?) paid Antoine De Lestre and Joseph Lepage some 500 pounds of deerskins valued at 875 livres (Nassaney 2015:169). It is not known if these were produced at Fort St. Joseph or elsewhere, or their intended use. The Crown also paid for the repair and maintenance of Natives’ guns by various blacksmiths at the fort (Peyser 1978:99) along with musket balls, buckshot, lead, and powder needed for hunting and warfare. Merchants also provided tallow—a hard animal fat, separated by melting—that was used for soap and candles, mixed with pigment for face paint, and boiled with pine pitch to create a sealant for birch bark canoes (Nassaney 2015:169). Natives from Fort St. Joseph provisioned France’s indigenous allies dispatched from the fort to help fight the Chickasaws. Marie Madelaine Réaume, an Iliniwek woman who lived at Fort St. Joseph in the 1730s, and her household supplied grains (wheat, oats, and corn) and vegetables to French traders who wintered in the southern Great Lakes region. This agricultural surplus was central to the success of the St. Joseph fur trade (Sleeper-Smith 1998:56–57). Dunning Idle (2003:82–84) compiled information on the number of canoes sent to the St. Joseph River and the permits that were issued from 1721 to 1745. While they do not specify the types of goods traded, the data indicate that the French were importing significant quantities of goods for distribution to Native allies. Less is known about the types of furs that were collected and shipped back to Montréal from the fort. An undated report claimed that the fort could “furnish four hundred parcels of racoon [sic], bear, wildcat, dwarf deer, [and] elk” (Peyser 1978:30a). In 1757, the French explorer Bougainville estimated that Fort St. Joseph could produce the same number (400) of “packages of pelts of cats, bears, lynx, otters, deer, and stags” (Idle 2003:121). No mention is made of beaver. Documentary sources do not suggest any significant changes in subsistence practices while the fort was occupied. The economic activities noted by the English surveyor Thomas Hutchins during his 1762 visit were likely similar to earlier practices:

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It is inhabited by about a dozen French families who chiefly support themselves by the trade they carry on with the Indians and notwithstanding the country is very rich about them, they raise nothing more than some Indian corn and make a little hay to support their horses and mules and a few milch cows, which seems to be all the stock they have. (Cunningham 1961:72–73) His disdain for the French is apparent. Hutchins clearly implies that the fur trade is not a sustainable livelihood and derides the French for making so few improvements to the land. Indeed, he considers them as indolent as the Indians without saying so. The French were, after all, a vanquished people. When the English took control of the fort in 1761, relationships changed. Lord Jeffrey Amherst discouraged the practice of providing Natives with lavish gifts, including gunpowder and alcohol, in fur trade negotiations as the French had done, reasoning that it made them less industrious in acquiring furs. Native discontent with English practices and attitudes instigated Pontiac’s Rebellion in the spring of 1763, in which supporters of the Ottawa leader attacked Fort St. Joseph to drive the English from the area and encourage the return of the French (Widder 2013:157–159). The English responded by establishing a policy to limit colonial expansion into the interior via the Proclamation of 1763. After 1763, the French fur traders were allowed to remain at the fort and continue to practice the trade. Following a daylong raid and occupancy by a Spanish detachment from St. Louis in 1781, the site was abandoned and the area came under American control. Independent and American Fur Company traders like William Burnett and Joseph Bertrand continued fur trading in the St. Joseph River valley into the nineteenth century (Cunningham 1967; Johnson 1919:108–109). In June 1796, Burnett recorded in his ledger that he sold ninety-nine packs of fur comprising: “5 bears, 5 pound beaver, 10 fishers, 58 cats, 74 doe, 78 foxes, 108 wolves, 117 otters, 183 minks, 557 bucks, 1,231 deer, 1,340 muskrats, and 5,587 raccoons,” a clear indication of the decline of beaver and the importance of white-tailed deer, muskrats, and raccoons after the fort was abandoned (Johnson 1919:97–98). The St. Joseph Valley continued to provide substantial fur yields into the 1830s (Johnson 1919:143).

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The Context of Archaeological Materials in the Fort’s Vicinity Excavations conducted under the auspices of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project since 1998 have led to the recovery of a culturally and stratigraphically mixed assemblage of artifacts from three loci on the terrace overlooking the site of the fort in the floodplain (that is, 20BE23). First identified in the 1930s and designated the Lyne site (20BE10), this plowed terrace has yielded triangular Madison projectile points, grit- and shell-tempered pottery, copious amounts of fire-cracked rock, several stone smoking pipes, and a range of European imports including gunflints, flintlock hardware (that is, a trigger, sideplate), lead shot and musket balls, a pewter brooch, numerous copper-alloy scraps, hand-blown glass container fragments, and a cut fragment of trade silver perforated for ornamental use, among other probable eighteenth-century artifacts. No associated animal remains have been recovered from this site, likely due to poor preservation conditions. The Lyne site contains few undisturbed features due to twentieth-century plowing. However, Locus II contains two clusters of overlapping pits filled with carbonized corncobs located about 15 m apart (Figure 4.3). Analysis of the contents of four of these pits indicates that corncob remains are dominant, with small amounts of wood charcoal, raspberry, sumac, grape, and carbonized walnuts; seeds and nuts are possibly accidental inclusions (Hughes-Skallos and Allen 2012; Martinez 2009). These features bear formal similarity to the smudge pits used to tan hides (“corn holes”) that have been noted at several sites in the region, namely nearby Moccasin Bluff (Ford 1973), Rhoads in Illinois (Wagner 2011:98–100), and Gete Odena on Grand Island in Lake Superior (Skibo et al. 2004:171–174). A sample of the pit contents was radiocarbon dated to a.d. 1710 ± 50 years, indicating contemporaneity with the floodplain deposits (Nassaney et al. 2012:63). A stone scraper found near these pits is similar to the Chickasaw end scrapers from Mississippi, reinforcing the role of these pits in fur processing (see Johnson 2003:Figure 4.1n–q). Evidence for the processing and shipment of furs from site 20BE23 on the floodplain consists of an additional smudge pit, two baling needles, and an enormous quantity of well-preserved animal bone. The smudge pit appeared as a shallow, basin-shaped pit, about 20–25 cm in diameter and 9 cm in depth (Cremin and Nassaney 2003:79–82). It contained

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Figure 4.3. Remains of a smudge pit from Locus II on the terrace near the site of Fort St. Joseph are evidence for eighteenth-century fur-processing activities. Photograph by Stephanie Barrante. Courtesy of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project.

some charred oak wood and possible pinecones, along with ten grape seeds, two cherry stones, three fragments of acorn, and over 200 g of corn, including cob, kernel, cupule, and stalk fragments. It is similar in form and content to the pits found on the nearby terrace and testifies to hide-processing activities on the floodplain in close proximity to House 2, a French-style building. Whether it represents the work of a Native woman, her Métis daughter, or a French-Canadian fur trader, it points to the shared practices that emanated from relations of interdependency at Fort St. Joseph. An additional hide-processing artifact from the site includes a hide scraper made from a splayed musket barrel (e.g., see Gilman 1982:89) that was found by an artifact collector (Figure 4.4) (Hulse 1977; Nassaney et al. 2003:133). It is similar to examples of gun barrel hide scrapers (approximately a dozen) that were recovered at Fort Ouiatenon (Noble 1983:217) along with six iron spud hide scrapers (Tordoff 1983:80). Much of the butchering and processing of small fur-bearing animals likely occurred away from the Fort St. Joseph floodplain habitations. The absence of permanent European-style buildings and the paucity of imported ceramics on the terrace suggest Native or more ephemeral occupation associated with the final stages of hide preparation. Once furs were

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Figure 4.4. A splayed musket barrel would have made a suitable hide scraper (left), along with miscellaneous iron scraps from Fort St. Joseph. Courtesy of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project.

processed, they were bundled in preparation for shipment by canoe. Large baling needles recovered from the floodplain (20BE23) were used to secure the bundles with sail cloth to protect them in transport (Nassaney 2015:Figure 3.2).

Faunal Remains: Food or Furs? The exploitation and processing of furs for commercial use resulted in the deposition of animal remains that are frequently recovered archaeologically at sites associated with the fur trade (Nassaney 2015). Some of those same animals were a source of protein for Natives and Europeans alike, begging the question as to whether they were obtained for furs or food. Understandably, one need not exclude the other. Sheri Hannes (1994 cited in Nassaney 2015:85) examined faunal remains from a nineteenth-century fur-trading post on Leech Lake in northern Minnesota and compared them with a list of fur trade species collected by the American Fur Company. Her analysis demonstrated that the faunal assemblage did include a wide variety of fur trade animals; however, fewer species were represented

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than expected based on historical accounts. Two discrepancies were noteworthy. First, her sample included no beaver bones, though beaver was among the furs collected by the American Fur Company (see Hannes 1994:Table 7). Second, rabbits were well represented in the faunal assemblage, though relatively unimportant in the records. This suggested their importance as a subsistence item. She concluded that the local economy was focused on both subsistence and fur trade activities, but that the faunal assemblage is more reminiscent of food consumption at Ojibwe habitation sites than the processing of animals for the fur trade (Hannes 1994:82, 84). Because hide processing was oriented to ensuring choice pelts, animal selection and bone modification left archaeological signatures indicative of commercial exploitation and skinning (e.g., Lapham 2005). At Fort Albany, a seventeenth-century Hudson’s Bay Company settlement on James Bay, “disproportionately large numbers of skulls from small fur-bearing animals, mainly marten,” were recovered among the mammal bones (Ken­yon 1986:16). This pattern suggests how the animals were skinned and dismembered. The mortality profile of a population can also be used to determine if animals of a particular size were being hunted. Similarly, cut marks consistent with hide removal appear on certain skeletal elements in high frequencies. When cranial bones, teeth, and foot bones are recovered, the pattern is consistent with selective transportation in which skins were brought to a site, but not the meat (Jordan 2008:282). Kurt Jordan (2008:283, 289–290) reasoned that the high percentage of white-tailed deer remains at the Townley-Read site, a Seneca village, indicates that deer had become the primary focus of Native hunters by the eighteenth century when the fur trade in the lower Great Lakes region became diversified and shifted away from its seventeenth-century emphasis on beaver pelts. The most direct evidence of the fur trade at Fort St. Joseph comes from a remarkably well preserved assemblage of animal remains from the floodplain (20BE23), though subsistence also certainly played a role in the range of species represented. While analysis is ongoing, more than 22,000 individual faunal specimens have been examined, demonstrating that the vast majority of animal remains recovered derive from a variety of wild species, particularly white-tailed deer. Domesticated animals are confined to cow, pig, horse, and chickens, representing a minimal contribution to the diet (Becker 2004; Martin 2008).

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Thus far, over 5,600 individual specimens (bones, teeth, and bivalve shells) have been identified, which constitute 25.2 percent of the analyzed faunal assemblage by count (NISP) and 62.2 percent by NISP weight. This represents a total of fifty vertebrate and invertebrate taxa consisting of twenty bird taxa (order, subfamily, genus, or species), seventeen mammal taxa (genus or species), six fish taxa (family, genus, or species), at least four kinds of reptiles (all turtles), one amphibian (a frog), and three species of freshwater mussels. Although not abundant, the diversity of bird taxa is consistent with other French colonial faunal assemblages in the Midwest such as at the Fort Michilimackinac, Fort Ouiatenon, Fort de Chartres, Laurens, and Duckhouse sites (Martin 2008:199–200; Scott 1985:189–190), including trumpeter swan, Canada goose, several species of ducks, sandhill crane, shorebirds, passenger pigeon, American crow, hawks, woodpeckers, wild turkey, ruffed grouse, prairie chicken, and domesticated chicken. Fish are underrepresented, but lake sturgeon remains are more numerous than the bones from all other fish, consisting of suckers, bowfin, gar, and northern pike. Mammals are dominated by white-tailed deer (more than 2,800 specimens) with other species including porcupine, tree squirrel, eastern cottontail, and furbearers such as beaver, raccoon, muskrat, marten, bobcat, gray fox, and black bear (Table 4.1). Aside from deer, all but beaver and raccoon occur in low numbers. Fragmentation makes it difficult to distinguish between large bovids such as cattle and bison. Whereas only cattle have been positively identified, there are large bone fragments that may possibly be from bison, and early historical records indicate that bison formerly occurred in Michigan’s southern two tiers of counties (Baker 1983:622). There are sixty-eight swine remains, sixteen bones and teeth from wapiti (elk), and two horse teeth. The overwhelming frequency of specimens from white-tailed deer and other wild species suggests a reliance on local food resources and the adoption of new culinary practices on the frontier. This is indicative of the close relations that the French cultivated with their Native allies, much as we would expect to see at a fur-trading post. Many bone and antler specimens were modified to function as artifacts (for example, gaming pieces, awls, projectile points), reflecting a close association with local Native Americans. Much of the analyzed bone appears to derive from animals hunted and butchered for subsistence. Small and medium-size furbearers comprise

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less than 11 percent of all identified vertebrate remains. However, deer at Fort St. Joseph were also hunted for their hides and were processed for leather goods like moccasins, just as in eighteenth-century Detroit (Cangany 2012). The smudge pits identified on the terrace (20BE10) and the floodplain (20BE23) support this interpretation. This would also help to explain the derivation of the deerskins provided to Natives and others that are noted in the vouchers discussed previously. Peyser (1978:123) also documented a memorandum of expenses that included “deerskin to make shoes” and “skins smoked (and) to make shoes.” These “shoes” are likely souliers sauvages (Indian shoes), or what later became known as “moccasins” (see Cangany 2012:268).

Paying Homage to Bones, Marrow, and Other Fatty Substances Abraham Nasatir (1929) provided an unusual perspective on the commodities involved in the fur trade between Europeans and Native Americans. He translated documents pertaining to a late eighteenth-century incident involving the rogue trader Jean-Marie Ducharme, who operated at various times out of Cahokia (Illinois) and La Baye (Wisconsin). During the winter of 1772–1773, Ducharme and his engagès conducted trade with the Little Osage on the Missouri River in Spanish-controlled Upper Louisiana. Ducharme’s party was captured the following spring as they attempted to transport their bounty to the east side of the Mississippi River. The transcribed testimonies of two of Ducharme’s crewmen provide details of the event, and an inventory of the confiscated cargo reveals the range of goods that were produced, exchanged, and transported by Natives and Euro-Americans who participated in the fur trade. In addition to numerous European-made items, dried squash, and grain, the inventory lists deer tongues, beaver tails, venison, pieces of dried meat, and large quantities of skins. The animals mentioned include white-tailed deer, black bear, bison, and beaver (their skins variously described as with hair, without hair, tanned, and dried), along with scattered references to sacks made of black-footed ferrets and skins from fox, wolf, and swan (skins and their feathers). Of special interest here are the frequent allusions to mixed grease, barrels of grease, bear oil, unmelted bear grease, skins full of oil, and cakes or loaves of tallow (Nasatir 1929:424–436).

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These latter products attest to the commercial importance of rendered animal fats in addition to skins and hides. Bear oil was a cherished commodity for the French and French-Creole settlements in Upper and Lower Louisiana, where it was used for frying and seasoning (Ekberg 1985:302, 1998:217; Miller Surrey 2006:289–293; Morgan 2010:106–108), especially since venison was so lean. Reportedly a suitable substitute for high-quality olive oil (Brown 2002:8), bear oil (huile d’ours) was also used for the maintenance of guns and other metal artifacts (Morgan 2010:106–107). The large quantities that were convoyed to New Orleans from the Illinois Country (as depicted by Alexandre de Batz in “Desseins de Sauvages de Plusieurs Nations” in 1735; see Franke 1995:Plate XI) suggests that the Michigamia who resided near Fort de Chartres (and others farther south) used caldrons and large kettles to render bear oil on a scale that exceeded opportunistic production. For example, Indians in Arkansas were reportedly capable of annually producing 3,000 pots of bear oil, which was the equivalent of about 1,500 Canadian gallons (Morgan 2010:107–108). Whereas in the western Great Lakes region bear oil was referred to as a stored food additive among the Ojibwas (Henry 1985:95) and as an important dietary ingredient to thick soups consumed by voyageurs (Lavender 1964:28), the commercial importance of bear oil at sites such as Michilimackinac, Fort St. Joseph, and Detroit is not as well documented. While there is no mention of bear oil in the Fort St. Joseph manuscripts translated by Peyser (1978), tallow appears frequently in the vouchers (e.g., Peyser 1978:130; see also Miller Surrey 2006). In 1750, Jean-Baptist Lefebre provided tallow to the Natives who were “going down to Montreal to see the general.” Tallow, which was derived from the fatty tissue or suet of mammals, had several commercial uses, as mentioned previously. Numerous authors have discussed the rendering of animal bones for their grease content (e.g., Heinrich 2014; Leechman 1951; Outram 1999, 2001; Vehik 1977), and several researchers have considered how bone fractures on archaeological specimens were produced (e.g., Heinrich 2014; Karr and Outram 2011; Morlan 1984; Noe-Nygaard 1977; Outram 2001). Few faunal analysts, however, have considered the possibility that fragmented bones were the residue from using marrow and bone grease for tanning animal skins instead of or in addition to being the by-product of grease extraction for making soups, stews, or pemmican. Although Vehik

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(1977:171) mentions that bone grease “could be used to tan hides,” her review emphasizes dietary uses of bone grease that was manufactured by Northern Plains and Upper Midwest Native Americans. Most historical discussions of traditional hide preparation mention the use of brains (from deer, wapiti, or moose) for tanning skins that were made into moccasins, mittens, or leggings (e.g., Hatt 1969:14–15; Mason 1891:568ff., cited by Hatt 1969:15). After the skin interiors were scraped to remove fatty tissue, the brains were rubbed on to render the skins more pliable and soft. The skins may then be spread over a wooden framework to be smoked over a smoky fire and then soaked in warm water to make them easier to work (Van Kirk 1980:54). However, in lieu of brains, a variety of fatty substances, such as bone grease (Grinnell 1972:216, cited by Vehik 1977:171), bone marrow (Teit 1900:184–185), oil extracted from fish heads (Teit 1900:185), and fish roe (Hatt 1969:15) can be used for tanning hides. Logan (1998) discusses bison and caribou in evaluating evidence for bone grease extraction for a bone-boiling pit at the White Rock site in north-central Kansas. The pit yielded just over 80 percent distal leg specimens from bison, in contrast to all other contexts at the site where only 26 percent of the specimens were from the distal leg bones. Logan suggests the high proportion of distal leg specimens is consistent with ethnographic accounts among the Hidatsas (for bison) and the Nunamiuts (for caribou) in that both groups preferred fat from the extremities over fat from the axial bones and shoulder blades for food as well as for technological uses (Binford 1978:24, cited by Logan 1998:359). The distal leg bones have the highest concentrations of oleic acid—that is, the “lowmelting-point fats”—which is the “white fat” that Binford’s Nunamiut informants said was the most desirable for nutrition and for waterproofing hides (Binford 1978:23–24). Binford (1978:43) noted that the distal tibias, metatarsals, and metacarpals of caribou were the preferred bones for marrow. In spite of the high quality of the marrow in the phalanges, the extraction was labor-intensive (Binford 1978:31), and his Nunamiut informants said that the marrow from phalanges was only used for waterproofing footwear (Binford 1978:43). At the site of Perrot’s Post near Trempealeau, Wisconsin, a discrete midden of more than 5,000 animal remains was interpreted as the residue of extracting bone marrow and producing bone grease as an emergency dietary supplement during winter occupations by the French parties that

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occupied the site during the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century (Parish 1996). Apparently, more than half of the specimens had been incinerated following the boiling of cancellous bone fragments to render bone grease. The use of marrow and bone grease to process beaver and deer hides at Perrot’s Post is consistent with Harold Innis’s (1962:14) observation that the inner side of beaver pelts was “scraped and rubbed with the marrow of certain animals.” At Fort St. Joseph, there is a high frequency of intentionally fractured large mammal bones, especially from white-tailed deer, which suggests breakage patterns to extract marrow or to render grease by boiling in the newly imported kettles. Heinrich (2014:9) warns that if faunal assemblages are interpreted as being involved in making stews or in rendering grease, it must first be objectively demonstrated that fragmentation was not the result of taphonomic processes such as carnivore damage or trampling. At Fort St. Joseph, less than 1.5 percent of the deer bones exhibit damage from carnivores, and rodent-gnawed bones are even less frequent. Thus, postdepositional animal modification can be ruled out as a significant factor that contributed to breakage. More than 100 bones exhibit cut marks consistent with hide removal, dismemberment, and filleting of meat, and these occur on crania, vertebrae, ribs, and long bones from white-tailed deer as well as on specimens from cattle, swine, wapiti, black bear, beaver, raccoon, Canada goose, and trumpeter swan. Broken bones with spiral fractures are common, but other than cut marks, no comprehensive, detailed recordation of fractures and impact scars (e.g., Noe-Nygaard 1977; Outram 1999, 2001) has been attempted for deer and unidentified large mammal shaft fragments. Nor has a thorough demographic profile been determined for deer in order to reveal if selective hunting practices were being employed (see Lapham 2005). Finally, the difficulties with establishing a precise age for the bone refuse deposits inhibit our ability to identify significant temporal patterns in animal selection and processing. Nevertheless, the faunal remains provide data on the species of animals that were being butchered and the skeletal portions that are represented. Contextual complications for the archaeological deposits, such as longterm occupations, reoccupation of many areas, multiple activities in the same locations, and secondary deposition of refuse, mask direct evidence of bone grease rendering (e.g., see Vehik 1977:172–175), let alone using bone grease specifically for hide tanning. Attention can be given to the various skeletal portions that have been identified. The quantities presented

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in Table 4.1 include data that were compiled by Becker (2004:81) along with more recent faunal analyses by Hearns (2015) and Martin (2008, this volume). Because the proportions for Fort St. Joseph have been so consistent among all three researchers, the quantities are combined. Table 4.1 reveals that 50 percent of the deer specimens are from the axial and cranial portion, 44.5 percent from the proximal appendicular bones, and only 5.5 percent from the distal legs and feet. If the distal tibia is added to the totals for the distal leg bones (see Binford 1978:43) along with carpals, tarsals, and phalanges, the proportion increases to only 9.0 percent of the deer specimens. Deer bones from excavations at Fort Ouiatenon, a contemporaneous French fur-trading post in the Wabash Valley that functioned in a similar manner as Fort St. Joseph, shows only a slightly greater proportion of 13.7 percent originating from the distal appendages. Thus, the low frequencies of metapodials suggest that they were being crushed beyond recognition at a relatively higher rate than other elements and/or were being deposited elsewhere at other loci of bone processing. Since ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological studies indicate that the metacarpals and metatarsals are the most heavily utilized bones for marrow and bone grease, this small proportion among all deer bones does not provide convincing evidence for the collecting and use of the lower legs of deer for subsistence or for processing hides at the site. Perhaps these marrow-rich bones were being especially selected and taken to other areas to be processed.

Discussion Europeans subsisted predominantly on domesticated plants and animals in their homelands. They made efforts to transplant this dietary regime into the New World with variable success. As a result, Europeans frequently relied on wild plants and animals provisioned by Native hunters, gatherers, and farmers (see Loyer Rouselle and Auger, this volume). Because many furbearers were also traditionally hunted for subsistence (for example, deer, beaver, bison), there is often overlap between animals taken for food and furs. Native subsistence was little changed in the course of the fur trade until Native producers were either dispossessed from their land or unable to maintain the seasonal round that marked earlier food-collecting strategies (Nassaney 2015; see also Loyer Rousselle and Auger, this volume; Morgan

Table 4.1. White-tailed Deer Skeletal Remains (NISP) from the Fort St. Joseph and Fort Ouiatenon Sites Anatomical Part Axial/Cranial Crania Antler Mandible Hyoid Isolated teeth Cervical vertebrae Thoracic vertebrae Lumbar vertebrae Vertebrae, cervical-lumbar Sacrum Costal cartilage Sternum Rib Rib/vertebra fragmentsc Innominate bone (pelvis) Proximal Appendicular Scapula Humerus Radius Ulna Femur Patella Tibia, proximal-middle Tibia, distal Distal Appendicular Metapodial Carpal bones Metacarpal Astragalus Calcaneus Tarsal bones Metatarsal Carpal/tarsal fragments Phalanx 1 Phalanx 2 Phalanx 3 Phalanx 1–3 Sesamoid Grand Totals

Fort St. Josepha NISP % 1,648 50.0 97 2.9 5 0.2 35 1.1 7 0.2 298 9.0 77 2.3 94 2.9 197 6.0 34 1.0 24 0.7 3 0.1 6 0.2 649 19.7 122 1,465 146 259 209 116 301 42 274 118 180 14 34 11 16 31 30 18

3.7 44.5 4.4 7.9 6.3 3.5 9.1 1.3 8.3 3.6 5.5 0.4 1.0 0.3 0.5 0.9 0.9 0.5

13 6 3 3 1 3,293

0.4 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.03 100.0

Fort Ouiatenonb NISP % 1,850 36.5 146 2.9 150 3.0 56 1.1 0 389 7.7

209

4.1

12 740 54 94 2,786 356 345 251 158 762 82 568 264 433 16 74 17 82 65 58 32 15

0.2 14.6 1.1 1.9 55.0 7.0 6.8 5.0 3.1 15.0 1.6 11.2 5.2 8.5 0.3 1.5 0.3 1.6 1.3 1.1 0.6 0.3

70 4 5,069

1.4 0.1 100.0

Notes: aIncludes quantities presented by Becker (2004:81). bBased on quantities presented by Martin (1986:119). cIndeterminate small fragments of ribs, lumbar vertebra transverse processes, or thoracic vertebrae dorsal spines.

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and MacDonald, this volume, on the persistence of Native cultural practices). They were seldom induced to pursue new subsistence strategies despite the array of new tools (for example, plows) and resources (for example, domesticated plants and animals) at their disposal. William Cronon (1983) examined the disparate land-use practices of Natives and English in New England, noting how domesticated animals such as hogs competed for resources that Natives foraged (for example, clam beds). In general, domesticated animals were inconsistent with Native value systems and were only adopted as a last resort (see Pavao-Zuckerman 2007). In contrast to Native groups that maintained traditional subsistence pursuits, the French often chose to relinquish their former dietary practices. Small posts like Fort St. Joseph and Fort Ouiatenon have principally yielded wild animal remains as a direct reflection of the intensity of interaction and exchange in fur trade society (Martin 2008). In addition, we have yet to identify evidence of specific cuts of meat that are indicative of traditional French cuisine; the elements and butchering marks observed at Fort St. Joseph are similar to those from sites where Natives predominate. The faunal assemblage at Fort St. Joseph is clearly a case in which the French were borrowing practices from the Natives. This is similarly reflected in the use of maize at Fort St. Joseph and the absence (thus far) of Old World domesticated plants like wheat, oats, and barley. Formation processes may play a role in their absence since these grains are typically processed before being consumed. However, they have seldom been recovered archaeologically even at sites in the St. Lawrence River valley or in the Illinois Country, which was producing a surplus for shipment to New Orleans and French colonies in the Caribbean. Likewise, the faunal assemblage at Fort Ouiatenon, a local distribution center established in 1717 along the Wabash River that housed a small detachment of about a dozen marines and fewer than twenty French families, is also dominated by wild species, most notably white-tailed deer, raccoon, waterfowl, and wild turkey. Although domesticated animals are present, they were used to supplement the predominantly wild animal diet. Several modified animal remains also reflect trade with local Native groups, the presence of local Natives, or perhaps French accommodations to local Native customs (Martin 1986, 1991a, 1991b). A similar pattern occurs at Fort St. Joseph, where excavations have yielded bone tools, bone or antler gaming pieces, and high frequencies of wild animal remains (Nassaney 2008).

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Culinary and hide-processing practices utilizing marrow, grease, and brains from deer, wapiti, and bison are an extension of this cultural borrowing and sharing among European traders and their Native trading partners in North America (see Pendery, this volume, on creolization as a result of cultural borrowing). The intensive, and intentional, breakage of deer bones at Fort St. Joseph may have been related to hide processing instead of, or in addition to, food preparation practices. Given the relatively small proportions of lower leg bone specimens at both Fort St. Joseph and Fort Ouiatenon, perhaps bone grease rendering and hide processing occurred away from habitation areas but at special activity areas nearby. In the case of Fort St. Joseph, the Lyne site may be one such area, as indicated by smudge pits that were discovered there during limited excavations. If numerous deer bones are eventually encountered at the Lyne site, we predict they will consist mostly of lower leg bones that were selected for use in tanning hides by smoking over smudge pits. Perhaps the absence of large numbers of metapodials at the Fort St. Joseph site indicates that lower leg bones were being segregated and taken to locations where such hide tanning was taking place. Alternatively, metapodials may have been saved and processed elsewhere for special subsistence uses involving the preparation of soups, stews, or pemmican.

Conclusion Ongoing and future archaeological investigations of French sites involved with the colonial fur trade have the opportunity to address taphonomic, behavioral, and commercial questions concerning details on foodways and hide-processing activities for which historical documents are silent. Analysis of intrasite distributional patterns at Fort St. Joseph will hopefully reveal if animal species and anatomical portions are disproportionately represented in different areas of the site (Hearns 2015). As more detailed temporal indicators are recognized, it should be possible to discern if changes occur in these frequencies over the span of the site’s occupation. Special attention should continue to be given to recognizing activity areas that have residues that may have been associated with bone grease rendering and the application of grease, brains, and other fatty substances to hides as part of the tanning process. Activities associated with butchering animals for fur or food can be detected by examining various aspects of animal remains, along with features and artifacts in

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archaeological assemblages from fur trade societies. They provide insights into the accommodations that both Natives and newcomers made to colonial entanglements. When examined in a larger spatial and temporal context, the evidence also suggests that English and French patterns of animal exploitation are different. The variation derives not from some essentialized “English” or “French” cultural patterns, but from the differing political and economic practices each group employed to engage with local Native populations. We suspect that if there had been more French settlers in North America, they may have asserted greater political autonomy and perhaps chosen to distance themselves socially from Native groups. Under these conditions, the French may not have needed Native allies and would have been more successful at maintaining their ancestral subsistence practices based on domesticated plants and animals. An Old World system was implanted with greater success in the original English colonies from Maine to Georgia. It was not put into place in the western Great Lakes region until the early nineteenth century, when Americans used treaties to dispossess Native peoples of their ancestral homelands, and removed them west of the Mississippi River to shield them from the ill effects of Western civilization.

Acknowledgments Much of the research and writing on Nassaney’s contribution to this chapter was conducted while he was on sabbatical leave from his teaching duties at Western Michigan University (WMU) preparing a longer study on the archaeology of the North American fur trade (Nassaney 2015) during the 2013–2014 academic year. Martin thanks Larry Grantham for recommended sources, Patricia Burg (Illinois State Museum librarian) for assistance in obtaining some obscure references, and WMU archaeological field school students for their efforts during zooarchaeology workshops. We also thank two reviewers for their constructive comments and Elizabeth Scott for her editorial guidance.

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Ballard, R. 1973 Old Fort St. Joseph. Fort St. Joseph Historical Association, Hard Scramble Books, Berrien Springs, Mich. Becker, Rory J. 2004 Eating Ethnicity: Examining 18th Century French Colonial Identity through Selective Consumption of Animal Resources in the North American Interior. Master’s thesis, Western Michigan University. Beeson, L. H. 1900 Fort St. Joseph—The Mission, Trading Post and Fort, Located about One Mile South of Niles, Michigan. Collections of the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society 28:179–186. Binford, Lewis R. 1978 Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. Academic Press, New York. Brandão, José António 1997 “Your Fyre Shall Burn No More”: Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Brandão, José António, and Michael S. Nassaney 2006 A Capsule Social and Material History of Fort St. Joseph (1691–1763) and Its Inhabitants. French Colonial History 7:61–75. Brown, Margaret Kimball 2002 The Voyageur in the Illinois Country: The Fur Trade’s Professional Boatman in Mid America. Center for French Colonial Studies Extended Publication Series, No. 3. Naperville, Ill. Cangany, Catherine 2012 Fashioning Moccasins: Detroit, the Manufacturing Frontier, and the Empire of Consumption, 1701–1835. William and Mary Quarterly 69(2):265–304. Clifton, James A. 1977 The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence. 1986 Potawatomi. In People of the Three Fires: The Ottawa, Potawatomi and Ojibway of Michigan, by James A. Clifton, George L. Cornell, and James M. McClurken, 39–74. The Grand Rapids Inter-Tribal Council, Grand Rapids, Mich. Coolidge, O. W. 1915 Address at the Dedication of the Boulder Marking the Site of Fort St. Joseph. Collections of the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society 39:283–291. Cremin, William M., and Michael S. Nassaney 2003 Sampling Archaeological Sediments for Small-Scale Remains: Recovery, Identification, and Interpretation of Plant Remains from Fort St. Joseph (20BE23). Michigan Archaeologist 49:73–85. Cronon, William 1983 Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Hill and Wang, New York.

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Cunningham, Wilber M. 1961 Land of Four Flags: An Early History of the St. Joseph Valley. William B. Eerd­ mans Publishing, Grand Rapids, Mich. Cunningham, Wilbur M., ed. 1967 Letter Book of William Burnett: Early Fur Trader in the Land of Four Flags. The Fort Miami Heritage Society of Michigan, St. Joseph. Eccles, William J. 1969 The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York. 1972 France in America. Harper and Row, New York. 1988 The Fur Trade in the Colonial Northeast. In History of Indian-White Relations, Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 4, edited by Wilcomb E. Washburn, 324–334. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Ekberg, Carl J. 1985 Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier. Patrice Press, Gerald, Mo. 1998 French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in the Illinois Country. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Faribault-Beauregard, Martha 1982 La population des forts français d’Amérique (xviiie siècle). 2 vols. Éditions Bergeron, Montréal. Ford, Richard I. 1973 The Moccasin Bluff Corn Holes. In The Moccasin Bluff Site and the Woodland Cultures of Southwestern Michigan, by Robert L. Bettarel and Hale G. Smith, 188–197. Anthropological Papers No. 49. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Franke, Judith A. 1995 French Peoria and the Illinois Country, 1673–1846. Illinois State Museum, Popular Science Series, Vol. 12. Springfield, Ill. Gilman, Carolyn 1982 Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Fur Trade. Museum Exhibit Series No. 2. Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. Gosden, Christopher 2004 Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 B.C. to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Grinnell, George Bird 1972 The Cheyenne Indians. Vol. 2, War, Ceremonies, and Religion. Reprinted. Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Originally published 1923, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. Hannes, Sheri M. 1994 The Faunal Analysis of the Horseshoe Bay Site: A Subsistence Study of a Nineteenth-Century Fur Trading Post. Master’s thesis, University of Iowa. Hatt, Gutmund 1969 Arctic Skin Clothing in Eurasia and America: An Ethnographic Study. Arctic Anthropology 5(2):3–132.

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Hearns, Joseph 2015 Patterns in Faunal Remains at Fort St. Joseph, a Fur Trade Site in the Western Great Lakes. Master’s thesis, Western Michigan University. Heidenreich, Conrad, and FranÇoise Noël 1987 Plate 40: France Secures the Interior. In Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. 1, edited by Richard Colebrook Harris. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Heinrich, Adam R. 2014 The Archaeological Signature of Stews or Grease Rendering in the Historic Period: Experimental Chopping of Long Bones and Small Fragment Sizes. Advances in Archaeological Practice: A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology (February). Henry, Alexander 1985 Massacre at Michilimackinac. In Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750–1870, edited by Frederick Drimmer, 73–104. Dover Publications, Mineola, N.Y. Hughes-Skallos, Jessica, and Susan E. Allen 2012 Analysis of Feature 21, a Smudge Pit from the Lyne Site, Michigan (20-Be10). Manuscript on file, Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University. Hulse, Charles A. 1977 An Archaeological Evaluation of Fort St. Joseph: An Eighteenth Century Military Post and Settlement in Berrien County, Michigan. Master’s thesis, Michigan State University. Idle, Dunning 2003 The Post of the St. Joseph River during the French Regime 1679–1761. Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana. Originally completed in 1946, Fort St. Joseph Museum, Niles, Mich. Innis, Harold A. 1962 The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. Jelks, Edward B., Carl J. Ekberg, and Terrance J. Martin 1989 Excavations at the Laurens Site: Probable Location of Fort de Chartres I. Studies in Illinois Archaeology No. 5. Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Springfield. Johnson, Ida Amanda 1919 The Michigan Fur Trade. Michigan Historical Commission, Lansing. Johnson, Jay K. 2003 Chickasaw Lithic Technology: A Reassessment. In Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era, edited by Charles R. Cobb, 51–58. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Jordan, Kurt A. 2008 The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. 2009 Colonies, Colonialism, and Cultural Entanglements: The Archaeology of

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Postcolumbian Intercultural Relations. In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David R. M. Gaimster, 31–49. Springer, N.Y. Karr, Landon P., and Alan K. Outram 2011 Tracking Changes in Bone Fracture Morphology Over Time: Environment, Taphonomy, and the Archaeological Record. Journal of Archaeological Science 39:555–559. Kenyon, Walter A. 1986 The History of James Bay 1610–1686: A Study in Historical Archaeology. Archaeological Monograph 10. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Lapham, Heather A. 2005 Hunting for Hides: Deerskins, Status, and Cultural Change in the Protohistoric Appalachians. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Lavender, David 1964 The Fist in the Wilderness. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Leechman, Douglas 1951 Bone Grease. American Antiquity 16:355–356. Logan, Brad 1998 The Fat of the Land: White Rock Phase Bison Hunting and Grease Production. Plains Anthropologist 43(166):349–366. Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2008 In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Eastern Woodlands. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Md. Martin, Terrance J. 1986 A Faunal Analysis of Fort Ouiatenon, An Eighteenth Century Trading Post in the Wabash Valley of Indiana. Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University. 1991a An Archaeological Perspective on Animal Exploitation Patterns at French Colonial Sites in the Illinois Country. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 189–200. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. 1991b Modified Animal Remains, Subsistence, and Cultural Interaction at French Colonial Sites in the Midwestern United States. In Beamers, Bobwhites, and Blue-Points: Tributes to the Career of Paul W. Parmalee, edited by James R. Purdue, Walter E. Klippel, and Bonnie W. Styles, 409–419. Scientific Papers Vol. 23, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, and Report of Investigations No. 52, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 2008 The Archaeozoology of French Colonial Sites in the Illinois Country. In Dreams of the Americas: Overview of New France Archaeology, edited by Christian Roy and Hélène Coté, 185–204. Archéologiques, Collection Hors Série 2. Association des Archéologues du Québec, Québec. 2010 Animal Remains from the Duckhouse Site and Their Implications for Eighteenth-Century Foodways in French Cahokia. In Constructing the Past: Essays in Honor of John A. Walthall, edited by Thomas E. Emerson, 186–226. Illinois Archaeology 22(1).

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Martinez, David J. 2009 Dirt to Desk: Macrobotanical Analyses from Fort St. Joseph (20BE23) and the Lyne Site (20BE10). Master’s thesis, Ohio State University. Mason, Otis T. 1891 Aboriginal Skin Dressing. Annual Report, U.S. National Museum 1889. Mason, Ronald J. 1986 Rock Island: Historical Indian Archaeology in the Northern Lake Michigan Basin. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology Special Paper 6. Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio. Mazrim, Robert F. 2011 At Home in the Illinois Country: French Colonial Domestic Site Archaeology in the Midwest 1730–1800. Studies in Archaeology No. 9, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana. Miller Surrey, N. M. 2006 The Commerce of Louisiana during the French Régime, 1699–1763. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Originally published 1916, Columbia University. Morgan, M. J. 2010 Land of Big Rivers: French and Indian Illinois, 1699–1778. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. Morlan, Richard E. 1984 Toward the Definition of Criteria for the Recognition of Artificial Bone Alterations. Quaternary Research 22:160–171. Myers, R. C., and Joseph L. Peyser 1991 Four Flags over Fort St. Joseph. Michigan History Magazine 75(5):11–21. Nasatir, Abraham P. 1929 Ducharme’s Invasion of Missouri: An Incident in the Anglo-Spanish Rivalry for the Indian Trade of Upper Louisiana [Parts I, II, and III]. Missouri Historical Review 24:3–25, 238–269, 420–439. Nassaney, Michael S. 2008 Identity Formation at a French Colonial Outpost in the North American Interior. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12(4):297–318. 2015 The Archaeology of the North American Fur Trade. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Nassaney, Michael S., William M. Cremin, Renee Kurtzweil, and José António Brandão 2003 The Search for Fort St. Joseph (1691–1781) in Niles, Michigan. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 28:107–144. Nassaney, Michael S., William M. Cremin, and LisaMarie Malischke 2012 Native American–French Interactions in 18th-Century Southwest Michigan: The View from Fort St. Joseph. In Contested Territories: Native Americans and Europeans in the Lower Great Lakes, 1700–1850, edited by Charles Beatty-Medina and Melissa Rinehart, 55–79. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing.

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Noble, Vergil E. 1983 Functional Classification and Intra-Site Analysis in Historical Archaeology: A Case Study from Fort Ouiatenon. Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University. 1991 Ouiatenon on the Ouabache: Archaeological Investigations at a Fur Trading Post on the Wabash River. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 65–77. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Noe-Nygaard, Nanna 1977 Butchering and Marrow Fracturing as a Taphonomic Factor in Archaeological Deposits. Paleobiology 3:218–237. Outram, Alan K. 1999 A Comparison of Paleo-Eskimo and Medieval Norse Bone Fat Exploitation in Western Greenland. Arctic Anthropology 36:103–117. 2001 A New Approach to Identifying Bone Marrow and Grease Exploitation: Why the “Indeterminate” Fragments Should Not Be Ignored. Journal of Archaeological Science 28:401–410. Parish, Michael J. 1996 Marrow Extraction from Bone Assemblages: Emphasis on Site 47Tr30 “Perrot’s Post Area.” Appendix B in Public Archaeology at Trempealeau, by Robert F. Boszhardt, Roland L. Rodell, Jeremy L. Nienow, and Bonnie Christensen. Reports of Investigations No. 257, Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center, University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. Paterson, Alistar 2011 A Millennium of Cultural Contact. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, Calif. Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet 2007 Deerskins and Domesticates: Creek Subsistence and Economic Strategies in the Historic Period. American Antiquity 72:135–144. Peyser, Joseph L. 1978 The Fort St. Joseph Manuscripts: Chronological Inventory and Translations. Manuscript on file, Niles Public Library, Niles, Mich. 1992 Letters from New France: The Upper Country, 1686–1783. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Rothschild, Nan A. 2003 Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: The Spanish and Dutch in North America. Smithsonian Books, Washington, D.C. Scott, Elizabeth M. 1985 French Subsistence at Fort Michilimackinac, 1715–1781: The Clergy and the Traders. Archaeological Completion Report Series No. 9. Mackinac Island State Park Commission, Mackinac Island, Mich. Skibo, James M., Terrance J. Martin, Eric C. Drake, and John G. Franzen 2004 Gete Odena: Grand Island’s Post-Contact Occupation at Williams Landing. In Grand Island Archaeology, edited by Sean B. Dunham, 167–189. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 29(2).

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Sleeper-Smith, Susan 1998 Furs and Female Kin Networks: The World of Marie Madeleine Réaume L’archevêque Chevalier. In New Faces of the Fur Trade: Selected Papers of the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1995, edited by Jo-Anne Fiske, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and William Wicken, 53–72. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing. Teit, James 1900 The Thompson Indians of British Columbia. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 2, Part IV, 163–392. Tordoff, Judith Dunn 1983 An Archaeological Perspective on the Organization of the Fur Trade in Eighteenth Century New France. Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University. Turgeon, Laurier, Deny Delâge, and Réal Ouellet, eds. 1996 Transferts culturels et métissages: Amérique/Europe XVIe–XXe siècle. Les Presses de l’Universite Laval, Québec. Van Kirk, Sylvia 1980 Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Vehik, Susan C. 1977 Bone Fragments and Bone Grease Manufacturing: A Review of Their Archaeological Uses and Potential. Plains Anthropologist 22:169–182. Wagner, Mark 2011 The Rhoads Site: A Historic Kickapoo Village on the Illinois Prairie. Studies in Archaeology No. 5. Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana. Widder, Keith R. 2013 Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-American War of 1763. Michigan State University Press and Mackinac State Historic Parks, East Lansing and Mackinac Island, Mich.

5 Landscapes of Forgetting and the Materiality of Enslavement Using Class, Ethnicity, and Gender to Search for the Invisible on a Postcolonial French House Lot in the Illinois Country Erin N. Whitson The French, Spanish, and Americans shied away from using the words esclave, esclavo, and slave, except in official documents. The French community used the terms nègre and noir, and Americans used negro, black, or colored. The Catholic church in the Ste. Genevieve District which owned slaves, referred to them as servants. —Walter Schroeder (2002:12, n.11)

Those who speak loudly oftentimes get the most attention, to the detriment of others who whisper. Colonial powers and their subjects, because of their ability to drastically impact the narratives handed down (through material culture, the written word, and their heavy hands in shaping the landscape) speak the loudest historically and archaeologically. Marginalized groups (in this case, enslaved individuals) seem to whisper tales of their own in the background. While many scholars in the Illinois Country (Edwards 2006; Ehrhardt 2010; Gums 1988; Kimball-Brown 1991; Kuehn 2010; Mazrim 2010, 2011; Trimble et al. 1991; Walthall 1991) and elsewhere in the New World (Waselkov 1997; see Scott, this volume) have investigated numerous Francophone colonial and postcolonial contexts in the Americas, fewer have investigated outbuildings on Francophone sites, or the enslaved men and women who lived and/or worked within their confines. This chapter focuses on one of the least understood contexts in the American French postcolonial world, the enslaved within the Illinois Country (see Figure 5.1).

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Figure 5.1. Map of French territory in North America; base map from www.yourchildlearns.com/online-atlas/images/map-of-united-states-2 .gif; web; October 12, 2015; original map modified by author.

My contribution to this volume’s conversation about Francophone experiences in the Americas includes a layering of ideas about landscape and power with aspects of identity such as class, gender, and ethnicity. Examining the ways that slaves on the Janis property can be seen archaeologically creates opportunities for us to gain more nuanced and diverse understandings of life in Francophone places in American landscapes. This layering should provide an example of how to go about uncovering people who, over time, and by intention, have been systematically erased from physical and remembered landscapes. By comparing an assemblage from the still-standing main house on the property to an assemblage from a long-decayed outbuilding in the backyard of the main house (Figure 5.2), I demonstrate that enslaved individuals in ethnic French communities can be visible in the archaeological record should one look for them. That they can be found, despite an attempt by the ethnic French in the

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Figure 5.2. Location of excavation of the outbuilding, illustrating how near it was to the main house. The photograph was taken from the back porch of the Janis house. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth M. Scott.

colonies to form active spaces of forgetfulness where their “servants” were concerned (see quote at beginning of chapter; Schroeder 2002:12), is a testament to the materiality of enslavement. While this materiality sits in the literal and figurative background, its presence haunts the landscape in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, as surely as the more physical French remnants do. I strive to investigate the materialities of enslavement in spaces such as Ste. Genevieve outside the bounds of the Anglo-American plantation sites usually studied by historical archaeologists. To address these problems, I examine an assemblage belonging to an outbuilding, and those working within its confines, on a property owned by the ethnic French Janis family. I also look at materials that came from the yard off the back porch of the main house, which should represent activities undertaken by the Janis family. The comparison of these assemblages shows subtle but real distinctions between two groups of people consuming objects coming from the same sources. I end with a discussion of the materiality of enslavement as seen on the Janis property. Since this

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is the first study of a slave quarter on a middle Mississippi Valley Francophone site, it will, I hope, provide food for thought for future investigations concerning marginalized people and places in French colonial and postcolonial settings. To make sense of my work within these contexts, I begin with a brief history of the community and where it fit within the larger French postcolonial world.

Ste. Genevieve The French settled into the original town of Ste. Genevieve around 1750 (Ekberg 1985:25) in what was primarily an agriculturally based community. Though other trades existed in the town—including salt making, fur trading and lead mining—the most successful economic pursuit in the earlier years was that of farming. Keene (2002) illustrates the impact this agricultural activity had within the French colonial system at the time, writing, “the Illinois Country became the bread basket for the lower Mississippi River Valley and the Caribbean. Those settlements, receiving food from Illinois, could concentrate on other pursuits such as defense and trade in Louisiana and sugar production in the West Indies” (Keene 2002:34). The success of agricultural pursuits in this region was due to the labor of enslaved Africans. The slavery system in French New World colonies was governed by royal policies known as the Code Noir, which regulated the sale, care, religious conversion, and punishment of African slaves. Although historians have studied African and Native slavery in the Illinois Country (e.g., Ekberg 1985:197–239, 1992:138–161; Rushforth 2003), the topic has received little scholarly attention by archaeologists. Farmers were self-sufficient in the Illinois Country, and soon the population began to increase as new settlers moved into the area. Others came in response to the territorial ownership change that occurred following the French and Indian War in 1763. The French who lived in what became British lands poured across the Mississippi River because “if the French colonists of the Illinois Country could not be ruled by a French Catholic, Bourbon monarch they would prefer a Spanish Catholic, Bourbon monarch to a Protestant British one” (Keene 2002:69). With population increase, the village of Ste. Genevieve grew and the economic endeavors within the community grew to be more complex (Schroeder 2002). The city’s proximity to the Mississippi River was, in many instances,

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Figure 5.3. Map of Missouri, with labels of the Ste. Genevieve area. Base map from www.google.com/earth/, October 16, 2015; original map modified by author.

a benefit to the growing community. However, in 1785 the town found itself severely flooded, with water 12 to 15 ft deep (Hawkins 2007:27) in what was “probably the record flood on the middle Mississippi River” (Ekberg 1985:421). The townsfolk of what was later designated Vieux (old) Ste. Genevieve relocated to higher ground on a “colluvial deposit at an elevation approximately 6.5 m (21.3 ft) above the ground surface of the original site” (Norris 1991:134) (Figure 5.3). From the time the Americans bought the region in what is today best known as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the community of Ste. Genevieve increasingly became more “other” and less French, though French traditions and policies, including a French system of slavery, continued to be used well after the Americans moved in. The Americans streamed into the region in search of better business opportunities and new lands to settle. Ironically, despite this Americanization, the city today celebrates its Frenchness and sees more tourist activity thanks to its claim to the largest concentration of still-standing French colonial homes in North America outside of Montréal. Its main economic endeavors, however, fittingly, remain agricultural in nature. Seven archaeological investigations have been made in Ste. Genevieve. These include F. Terry Norris’s 1991 survey of Vieux (old) Ste. Genevieve next to the Mississippi River. Norris confirmed the site of the earlier settlement (1750s–1780s) through systematic pedestrian survey and surface collection. Archaeologist Kit W. Wesler also made a significant contribution

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to the study of historic Ste. Genevieve. From 1997 to 1999, Wesler examined three sites in the city occupied during the transition period (French to Spanish and Spanish to American): the Delassus-Kern house, the Felix Vallé house, and the Benjamin Shaw house (Wesler 1999, 2004, 2005). Elizabeth M. Scott conducted Illinois State University field investigations at the Bequette-Ribault house in 2004 and 2005. Scott started investigations at the Janis-Ziegler house (the focus of this chapter) in 2006 and has continued to work on the property to the present time. Meredith Hawkins (2007), Matthew A. Cox (2009), and Erin N. Whitson (2013) have also completed master’s thesis projects on the French Janis house lot.

The Janis-Ziegler House The still-standing Janis house (Figure 5.4) is located on St. Mary’s Road in Ste. Genevieve, south of Gabouri Creek. It was built in 1790 by Nicolas Janis of a vernacular timber frame poteaux-sur-sole (posts-on-sill) style of construction (Edwards 2006:23). Architectural historians have dubbed the home as a house in “transition” because of its mixture of “French and Anglo building methods” (Cox 2009:11), with an Anglo method of roof

Figure 5.4. Janis-Ziegler house, Ste. Genevieve. Photograph taken by author.

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construction on an otherwise French building. The home is unique also in that it marks the only known example in the Mississippi River valley of the architectural “sub-type, madriers, équares à la hache, en cannele (hewn planks placed in a framework of channeled upright timbers)” (Johnson 1974:4), forming a wall located in the lower level of the house. The builder and first owner of the home, Nicolas Janis, came originally from Québec to Kaskaskia, a major settlement in the Illinois Country, during a time of increased movement throughout the French Mississippi River valley. Eventually, in 1790, he moved to Ste. Genevieve. In 1796, Nicholas Janis deeded the property and house to his son François Janis (Hawkins 2007:32), who in the late 1790s and early 1800s converted a portion of the home into a tavern. Historian Carl Ekberg (1996:432) noted that reports in 1789 have Nicolas Janis and his family bringing up to nineteen slaves with them to Ste. Genevieve. Two years later, according to a census conducted by the Spanish government (Houck 1909:367), the Janis family had ten slaves living on their property. The Janis family and their enslaved men and women occupied the site from ca. 1790 to 1833. As was normal for most ethnic French and some early American households of the period, early urban properties often resembled their more rural counterparts (Edwards 2006; Ekberg 1985; Mazrim 2010, 2011). They often had many structures and features meant to support the family. These urban farmsteads, as Stewart-Abernathy defines them, were house lots (2004:56) “that contained the house itself and necessary spaces and structures to support the household in a time when city services were minimal.” They “incorporated into their residential spaces certain ‘alien’ elements such as chicken houses and gardens that stand today associated mostly with rural living” (Stewart-Abernathy 2004:56). For the Janis family, this included several outbuildings (specialized structures meant to support the main house in providing spaces for specific tasks or the housing of slaves) and supportive features such as a stable and barn, a garden, an orchard, and several (at least two) unidentified structures (Hawkins 2007). François Janis died in 1832 without a will. Because his children already owned their own properties and they expressed no interest in owning their father’s, it was sold to the German Ziegler family in 1833. I focus in this chapter on the ethnic French ownership of the site, from 1790 to 1833.

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The Outbuilding The outbuilding was discovered through part of Elizabeth Scott’s investigations of the property from 2006 to the present. French-styled (poteauxen-terre, or posts-in-ground) architecture and related deposits containing remains associated with an outbuilding were located in the backyard of the main house. The material evidence for the outbuilding includes remains related to foodways, construction and maintenance, and domestic production, and a few artifacts related to hunting and weaponry, lead-shot production, and trade—all of which indicate a diverse use of the outbuilding, while narrowing down the possible functions of the structure itself. The food remains (n=398, 41.0 percent of 877 total remains) as well as the ceramics (all from a lower to middle price range; n=12, 1.2 percent) found in the assemblage for the outbuilding indicate a more domestic setting than might be expected for a barn or stable. The high occurrence of eggshell (n=131, 13.5 percent) most likely indicates high occurrences of food preparation taking place around the outbuilding. Fragments of bricks (n=107, 11.0 percent) suggest the presence of a chimney, since there is no evidence that brick piers were used architecturally. Window glass (n=4, 0.4 percent) indicates the need for light within the structure coupled with the need to protect the inner space from weather or small wildlife. The presence of a chimney and window glass in the architectural remains suggests that people spent significant amounts of time inside the structure. It seems most likely, due to the architectural (n=364, 37.5 percent), food (n=398, 41.0 percent), and domestically oriented remains (n=25, 2.6 percent), that the outbuilding’s purpose was linked to some domestic role, such as slave quarters or a detached kitchen, or both. These functional categories could represent activities taking place either outside or inside the structure. The evidence for nonkitchen-related activities could result from individuals in the structure performing other chores that needed to be accomplished over the space of a day. The assemblage might also represent what those individuals were doing in preparation for their own meals and in the evenings on their own time.

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Methodology The first systematic archaeological investigation completed on the JanisZiegler property took place in 2006. It was conducted as a six-week field school through Illinois State University under the direction of Elizabeth M. Scott and Donald P. Heldman and included six students and a volunteer (Hawkins 2007:42). The units of excavation were organized in 5'× 5' units and the property was “divided into a grid of 10' squares on which the 5'× 5' excavation units (quadrants) were placed” (Hawkins 2007:42). The units associated with the outbuilding were located on the southwestern portion of the property (Hawkins 2007:42) and were excavated in 2006–2009. The unit associated with the main structure was located on the western side of the building in the backyard, within sweeping distance of the porch, and was excavated in 2006 (Hawkins 2007:42). Excavation units were completed by hand using trowels, and layers were removed in both arbitrary and natural levels as warranted. Soils were water-screened through 1/16” hardware cloth. At the outset of this project, I was interested in examining ways in which the slaves and the Janis family might represent themselves to the world around them with the material culture available to them through British and later American markets. I wondered if certain aspects of identity—namely class, gender, and ethnicity—might be detectable in the two assemblages. I started my search for information about the economic status of both the ethnic French family and the people working or living in the outbuilding by placing the ceramics recovered from both assemblages in the framework designed by George Miller in 1980. Though Miller’s work focused on British wares and values, it was particularly helpful here because the recovered ceramics all appear to have come from British markets to the east of the Mississippi River. Miller’s 1980 version (rather than the 1991 version) was particularly helpful because it allowed for broader time periods to be examined (such as the Janis occupation period, 1790–1833) and for a more general grouping of ceramics based on decorative elements and types. Within Miller’s (1980) system there are four subcategories of ceramics. The 1st level, and the least expensive, includes undecorated refined white earthenwares, coarse red earthenwares, undecorated yellowwares, and stonewares. The 2nd is comprised of wares that had minimal hand-painted

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designs, “made by minimally skilled operatives” (Miller 1980:3). The 3rd level is made up of wares that were hand-painted with “motifs such as flowers, leaves, stylized Chinese landscapes or geometric patterns. With this group the painters needed to have enough skill to duplicate patterns so that sets of matched pieces could be assembled” (Miller 1980:4). The painted decorative effects are valued below only transfer printed wares and wares such as ironstone and porcelain, which comprise the 4th level in Miller’s (1980) system. Gender was a useful tool in finding the enslaved members of the Janis household in the archaeological record, especially in the examination of the functional activities and thus the time both men and women would have spent within or around each structure. I used a model by Scott (1991) to formulate functional and gendered categories. To create the necessary categories, I divided the artifacts into functional categories that could be, ideally, tied to gendered roles to which the ethnic French living in Ste. Genevieve might have subscribed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Of course, while most chores or activities would have been separated into prescribed roles for both men and women, the opposite gender could have and most likely at times did change the rules about what activities they chose to take on or participate in. These gendered categories include: domestic fowl production (indeterminate), health and sanitation (indeterminate), hunting and weaponry (men), interior design and decoration (women), food serving and consumption (women), food storage (women), food preparation (women), tools (men), clothing (indeterminate), lead shot production (men), sewing (women), trade (men), personal (indeterminate), and other (made up of the undetermined or unidentified artifacts—indeterminate). Ethnicity was the most difficult aspect to associate with the material assemblage. Ethnicity can depend on a multitude of factors, from a person’s age to his or her religious background, to the language he or she speaks or the geographic region in which he or she grew up. Race, on the other hand, is an external designation, usually considered incontestable, that places a person/group of people lower in the social stratification of society than those who placed the designation upon them (Orser 2007). There are no concrete or infallible methods that exist to tie differences in ethnicity or race to particular material goods, especially during and after the mass production of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. I looked for obvious ways the ethnic French would have represented

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themselves to the world around them, and ways African slaves under the tight supervision of their Catholic owners might have expressed their unique ethnicity(ies) in ways that would have been acceptable under the Code Noir. As discussed later, I saw ethnicity emerging on the Janis property in rather interesting ways.

Analysis Comparing the outbuilding to the main house provides a way to gage the differences in life for the enslaved and their French masters. It provides a counterweight against which to test the outbuilding assemblage. The artifacts recovered from the outbuilding make up sixteen functional categories that represent a diverse set of work- and nonwork-related activities taking place in this location: hunting and weaponry (n=2, 0.2 percent), trade (n=1, 0.1 percent), sewing (n=2, 0.2 percent), glass storage (n=4, 0.4 percent), construction and maintenance (n=364, 37.5 percent), lead shot production (n=1, 0.1 percent), food remains (n=398, 41.0 percent), domestic fowl production (n=4, 0.4 percent), clothing (n=2, 0.2 percent), tool use (n=2, 0.2 percent), personal objects (n=1, 0.1 percent), interior design and decoration (n=1, 0.1 percent), food serving and consumption (n=8, 0.8 percent), food preparation (n=4, 0.4 percent), and unidentified (n=176, 18.1 percent). I direct the majority of my attention to artifacts in this assemblage that make it possible to see people who have been systematically marginalized in domestic settings. I look at remains that show inequality in the material realm as well as in the use of space on the property. These will clarify some of the realities of the lives of enslaved people in Ste. Genevieve in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Economically sensitive artifacts at the Janis outbuilding, such as ceramics, provide further indications of just who was living or working inside the structure. Though ceramics make up only a small portion of the overall items recovered (n=12 Minimum Number of Vessels [MNV], 0.6 percent), they speak loudly, through type, decoration, and context. Using Miller’s (1980) economic level system, the economic position of those associated with the outbuilding starts to emerge. It was unsurprisingly the 1st level (or least expensive level) on the scale that had the highest proportion, by far, of the ceramics found in excavations of the outbuilding. Most of the ceramics found in the outbuilding assemblage, primarily

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Table 5.1. Economic Scales for Ceramic Vessels from the Janis Occupation of the Site (1790–1833) CERAMICS CATEGORIZED BY MILLER (1980) ECONOMIC LEVELS

Outbuilding MNV # %

Main House MNV # %

1st LEVEL undecorated creamware, pearlware, and refined white earthenware; coarse red earthenware 2nd LEVEL green shell-edged refined white earthenware; brown glazed refined white earthenware 3rd LEVEL hand-painted brown, light brown, and green annular bands and floral motif pearlware 4th LEVEL transfer-printed whiteware/pearlware; whiteware/ironstone

9

75.0

10

55.6

1

8.3

3

16.7

1

8.3

1

5.6

0

0.0

2

11.1

1 12

8.3 99.9

2 18

11.1 100.1

UNDETERMINED TOTAL VESSELS

plain refined earthenwares (undecorated creamwares, whitewares, and pearlwares) and coarse earthenwares (stoneware and coarse red earthenware), were from the lower end of the economic scale (Table 5.1). The economic levels associated with the ceramics found at each structure indicated, based on the proportion of ceramics within each economic level, that the residents living in the outbuilding during the Janis period did not possess the most expensive wares. While it is possible that the ceramics used by enslaved individuals could have been obtained by other means than purchasing (such as provisioning by owners or as hand-medowns, trading with others outside the house lot, stealing, or finding as refuse), the fact remains that there are clear differences in the ceramics used at the outbuilding and those used at the main house. There were no representations of 4th level—the most expensive—ceramics found in the outbuilding during the Janis occupation. By comparison, in the assemblage from the main house, 11 percent of ceramics were in the 4th

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level. Although not a large presence of 4th level wares, this may represent François Janis’s reluctance to buy new, fancy ceramics at the end of his lifetime, more than his ability to do so (Table 5.1). The animal remains associated with the outbuilding represented an assortment of different remains: eggshell (n= 131, 14.9 percent), shell (n=65, 7.4 percent), and bone (n=117, 13.3 percent). The main house, however, shows a more limited grouping of materials with only bone present. The eggshell that represented a good proportion of the animal remains for the outbuilding in the Janis period (41 percent of animal remains) was not present at all in the deposits associated with the main house. The presence of large mammal bones was also noted more frequently for the main house deposits than for the outbuilding deposits, but more specific information must await the completion of faunal analysis for the outbuilding. The intended lifespan of various buildings on a property (discernible in their construction methods) is also key to understanding the social and economic relationships between the occupants of those structures. The main house was constructed in the French poteaux-sur-sole style, in which the vertical wooden posts are placed into wooden sill beams that rest on limestone walls. This method protects the wooden supports from subterranean elements that tend to induce rot more quickly. Feature 7 (Figure 5.5), the wall ditch, shows closely spaced post molds of the outbuilding that signify the poteaux-en-terre style of construction commonly found in the region. This particular style of architecture, unlike the poteaux-sur-sole construction of the main house, tended to be much more organic and easily destroyed (Edwards 2006:265). Due to hot humid summers and cold humid winters (as well as problems with periodic flooding), the in-ground wooden supports would have required more upkeep and maintenance to prevent deterioration, especially when compared to structures (like the main house) that were built upon sills. Construction of the outbuilding in this fashion would have been much more immediately inexpensive, but less cost-effective over time. Economically, the main structure would have been the reverse: more immediately expensive, but much more cost effective over longer periods of time. Another result of this more costly manner of construction was that the building style of the main house made it a more permanent part of the landscape, a silent reminder of the greater importance and control of the French on the property and within the community as a whole, compared to persons living and working in the outbuilding.

Figure 5.5. Image of post molds from the outbuilding (Feature 7). Photograph courtesy of Richard Young.

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For the Janis main house occupation, the functional categories with the second highest percentage of artifacts (behind only construction and maintenance n=129, 50.0 percent) were serving and consumption remains (n=74 MNV, 28.7 percent). It was telling, however, that no artifacts linked with food preparation (that is, large stoneware, yellowware, or coarse red earthenware bowls, and so forth) were found in the Janis occupation around the main house, suggesting that little food preparation took place there. Another difference between the outbuilding and the main house during the Janis period was the higher percentage of artifacts connected to domestic fowl production (that is, gastroliths) found at the outbuilding. This, combined with the higher proportion of eggshell and higher proportion of food preparation ceramics found at the outbuilding, suggests that it was utilized as a place to prepare meals for both the people living in its confines and those living in the main structure. By comparing the main house with the outbuilding, in terms of architecture, food remains, and ceramics, the economic picture becomes less murky, confirming what may have been expected from the beginning: the family living in the main house was of a higher social status than those living or working in the outbuilding. In both the main house and the outbuilding, it seems that women can be most closely associated with the buildings. They were represented in the food remains (outbuilding: 45.4 percent; main house: 15.1 percent), interior design and decoration (outbuilding: 0.1 percent; main house: 0.0 percent), food serving and consumption (outbuilding: 0.8 percent; main house: 28.7 percent), food storage (outbuilding: 0.1 percent; main house: 1.9 percent), food preparation (outbuilding: 0.1 percent; main house: 0.0 percent), and sewing (outbuilding: 0.1 percent; main house: 0.8 percent) related artifacts. While the majority of the artifacts recovered were most likely used by women, men are represented in assemblages for both of the structures as well. The highest proportions of artifacts associated with men are architectural remains, making up 41.4 percent of the overall outbuilding assemblage and 50.0 percent of the overall main house assemblage. Overall, based on the day-to-day activities reflected in both locations, it appears that women, more than men, were working or spending more time within or around the structures. This may especially reflect the roles of men and women at the outbuilding. Most of the objects tied to men reflect shorter increments of

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time spent in or around the structure. The architectural artifacts, for example, most likely reflect the construction, maintenance, or destruction of the building. The objects tied most closely to women, such as ceramics and food remains, show a wider range of day-to-day activities taking place around the outbuilding, making it most likely that women were engaged in most of the daily activities at the outbuilding. This makes sense if men were most likely to have been doing agricultural work away from the home and property during the day. The use of space, then, follows gendered expectations as well. Enslaved women were doing the cooking, mending, and most likely the tending of small livestock on the property. These women, though virtually invisible otherwise, show themselves in the materials recovered archaeologically around the spaces they occupied. At first glance, neither the materials from the main house nor those from the outbuilding were extremely helpful in answering questions about ethnicity. The two honey-colored gunflints recovered in each assemblage (outbuilding: 0.2 percent; main house: 0.8 percent) are distinctively French and would have been easily identified as such at the time. French ceramics (tin-glazed earthenwares called faience) do not show up in either assemblage, likely because they became harder to acquire after the end of the French and Indian War (1763) in the Illinois Country in lands belonging to the British, Spanish, and later Americans. Purchasing French ceramics may have been more expensive than was practical. The rest of the artifacts recovered, though helpful in identifying gendered roles and differences in class, were mostly of British manufacture. These items say little, in and of themselves, about the ethnically “French” or “African Americans” living on the site in this post-French colonial period. The difficulty of finding materials that might represent French or African ethnicity could be due to a lack of good preservation of the material culture with ethnic associations, or it could show that residents in the community were less inclined, or were unable, to represent their heritage through durable items. Meals, as well as most articles of clothing (White 2012:3) and many other pieces of culture, both long-lasting objects as well as nonpermanent aspects of culture, are often ways in which people describe who they are and where they come from to the world around them. Often, these are also the items or aspects of life that deteriorate first. The most noticeable and prominent ethnically French aspects found at the property, through excavation and observation, were the structures and the physical layout of the property. The French origins of the Janis

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family are represented in the French architectural designs used in the construction of the outbuilding and the main house. The Janis family put up a palisade-style fence around their house lot and placed inside an orchard, stable, barn, hen/goose coops, vegetable garden, slave cabins, and a detached kitchen. The ethnic French shaped their landscapes in Ste. Genevieve in other ways as well. They farmed agricultural lots in typical French long lots in a field outside of town. They established a plethora of businesses meant to provide a means for the French to maintain their accustomed lifestyles. The French exercised a taken-for-granted control of space and employed it to further French ways of life in the Mississippi River valley. The African or African American ethnicity of enslaved individuals was much harder to “see” on the Janis property and across the landscape in general. Enslaved individuals had no way of obtaining goods from homelands, and since they were using materials that were almost exclusively British, coming from similar places as their master’s goods, it is difficult to reveal enslaved ethnic identities in material culture. Due to these circumstances, the use of socioeconomic markers was necessary to make visible people who were typically pushed into marginalized zones. Despite the fact that both the main house and outbuilding were built by the Janis slaves, the French ensured that the structures on the property were built in the ways that made sense to them, in a French manner. This shows, as seen in other examples from this volume (see Scott, Mann, and Costura), a tendency toward a continuity of ethnic French ways in faraway places (which is evident despite later adaptations and modifications that occurred both on the property as well as in the community). The French metaphorically wrote their slaves (and other, non-ethnically French peoples) out of the story by shaping the entirety of their immediate landscape to fit standards of Frenchness. Though telling us little about slave traditions, vernacular architecture, or religious beliefs, “class” and “gender” in this instance do present information about the lives of the individuals living or working within the confines of the outbuilding and their roles while occupying ethnically French territory.

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The Materiality of Enslavement Despite not finding easy ways of seeing the enslaved on the Janis property, this study demonstrates that it is possible to get a better grasp of what life could have been like in Ste. Genevieve for the enslaved laborers brought here without their consent. Likely living and/or working conditions for the enslaved on this property included space somewhat protected from the outside influences of weather and wildlife by side boards, windows, a fireplace, and a sturdy structure that had posts set into the ground in a firmly French manner. Materials used on a regular basis were serviceable but inexpensive and came from nearby British and later American markets. All in all, we see basic physical needs such as shelter, clothing, food, drink, and human interaction being met. While these individuals may have operated without a great deal of focused attention from their owners, they were still close enough to the main house to be monitored in their day-to-day activities, making cultural maintenance of African language, religion, movements, clothing, sounds, or foodways difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This was the opposite of the context of plantation slavery, where multiple slave dwellings confined to a quarter allowed a variety of means whereby enslaved individuals maintained African and African American cultural traditions (Brown and Cooper 1990; Fennell 2003; Ferguson 1992; Franklin 2001; Orser 1998; Russell 1997; Samford 2004). But if we see basic needs here being met, we also see systems of authority and power being engaged and reinforced on a day-to-day basis on this urban house lot. The presence of enslaved women on the property in designated “work spaces,” whether working or at rest, shows an unequal power relationship based on aspects that were considered incontestable at the time (that is, skin color and sex/gender). Close supervision by ethnic French masters living nearby (40 or 50 ft) in front of the small outbuilding would have limited how overtly the enslaved men and women on the Janis property could have actively sought to preserve their own lifeways and possibly how they presented themselves to each other, even privately (e.g., Thomas and Thomas 2004). The materiality of enslavement, then, at least for the enslaved on the Janis property, is, in part, rooted in unequal privileges on shared landscapes that overemphasize the ethnic French. Though the materialities of enslavement were unquestionably manipulative, we should not focus on the enslaved solely as slaves. They were

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men and women who existed as multifaceted individuals in ways far more complex than simply their status as victims. The presence of gunflints, lead sprue, and a fragment of catlinite (otherwise known as pipestone) from the outbuilding assemblage in designated slave space provides some deviation from the accepted and victimizing narratives of enslavement. Though slaves were forbidden to possess guns or lead shot by the same laws that forbade them from freely moving around the landscape (Trexler 1914:179), the enslaved on the Janis property at least minimally engaged with materials connected with the illicit. Exceptions to these rules concerning gun usage could, by law, be made if needed to protect the enslaved from wild animals or hostile Native Americans (Trexler 1914:179), but those living and working on the Janis property were unlikely to meet either in the vicinity of the outbuilding. The catlinite fragment also shows an engagement by the enslaved on the Janis property in unofficial markets, most likely with Native American groups who also faced (and continue to face) marginalization by European people and powers. Though not the only trade items recovered from the property (several trade goods were found in areas where it was more likely to have been the French engaging in such activities, toward the front of the house in excavation units not discussed here), the catlinite is a unique artifact in that it is a by-product of production with a material that comes from faraway sources. The lack of material representations of completed catlinite objects in the assemblage indicates curation or further engagement by these individuals in Native trade markets. They were, in both their engagements with gun-related material culture and in the catlinite fragment, active agents with their materiality. This materiality through landscape usage, gender roles, economic means (or lack thereof), material culture, and interpersonal engagements illustrates successful ways in which to explore the material realities of social interactions and the unequal power inherent in many such relationships. They also provide a means of searching out the lives of enslaved individuals in the margins of the French Illinois Country.

Conclusion Loyer Rousselle and Auger (this volume) write that “cultural interactions must take into account power relations and social inequalities in the context of colonialism and slavery systems.” I similarly argue that in

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the case of the Janis property, it is the intersectionalities of various identities that help reveal the power relations that might have existed between the enslaved individuals on the property and the Janis family. Class and gender implicitly impacted social position in Ste. Genevieve, as they did elsewhere in the colonial world. But skin color and ethnicity would have also controlled one’s ability to act, consume, and discard objects in unique ways as well. Relationships between different agents and their corresponding identities (including aspects of identity such as age, gender, class, and occupation) would have also influenced how and by what strategies negotiations, cultural maintenance, and resistance might have been put into action. The close contact between French owners and their African slaves in Ste. Genevieve on urban house lots, unlike the plantation examples provided by Hardy, Kelly, Loyer Rousselle and Auger, and Morgan and MacDonald (this volume), would have resulted in close supervision by the Janis family. This relationship would have made overt practices of nonFrench ethnic identity more difficult than in a plantation setting. We know that “Frenchness” or French ethnic connections were important to the French settlers in the Illinois Country (observable here through French gunflints, architecture, and participation in a French system of slavery). We might also assume that similar longings for home and familiar traditions from their own pasts existed for the enslaved on the Janis property and across the Americas. The lack of such representation on behalf of African and African American men and women on the Janis property illustrates power inequalities in ways far more intimate than may have been previously considered. Landscape, as much as ceramics, illustrates quite visibly which groups had the means of re-creating “home” in foreign places and which groups did not. The lack of visible ethnic dimensions from enslaved men and women present on the property makes it important to recall that the less durable items or elements of culture might also have answers for archaeologists interested in studying such things. In a way, this dynamic between the seen and the unseen has parallels on levels other than just the visible French and the nonvisible African slaves. For example, it is the more permanent French family’s main house that still stands, not the small outbuilding that once stood behind the main house. No materials of those who were forced to work on the property currently survive outside of the archaeology of the site. Though

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decomposition is natural, the outbuilding’s construction in the poteauxen-terre manner hurried the process, keeping slaves, at least in this context, in the literal and figurative background. Here again, we see that the nondurable elements such as the nonpreserved material culture, nonstanding architecture, perishable foods, forgotten customs, lost or forgotten languages, and ignored ideological viewpoints present the biggest challenges for archaeologists. These are challenges that enrich our understandings of the past. Put succinctly, as Hardy (this volume) writes, “artifacts are only a piece of the puzzle.” Even in noting the absence of these nondurables or nonvisible peoples, we find shades of possible truths often left unconsidered.

References Cited Brown, Kenneth L., and Doreen C. Cooper 1990 Structural Continuity in an African-American Slave and Tenant Community. Historical Archaeology 24(4):7–19. Cox, Matthew A. 2009 Living Beyond Their Means: An Archaeological Investigation of Consumption Patterns at the Janis-Ziegler Site (23SG272). Master’s thesis, Illinois State University. Edwards, Jay D. 2006 Creole Architecture: A Comparative Analysis of Upper and Lower Louisiana and Saint Domingue. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10(3):241–271. Ehrhardt, Kathleen L. 2010 Problems and Progress in Protohistoric Period Archaeology in the Illinois Country since Calumet and Fleur-de-lys. Illinois Archaeology 22(1):256–287. Ekberg, Carl J. 1985 Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier. Patrice Press, Tucson, Ariz. 1992 French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippian Frontier in Colonial Times. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. 1996 Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier. Patrice Press, Tucson, Ariz. Fennell, Christopher C. 2003 Group Identity, Individual Creativity, and Symbolic Generation in a BaKongo Diaspora. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7(1):1–31. Ferguson, Leland 1992 Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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Franklin, Maria 2001 The Archaeological Dimension of Soul Food: Interpreting Race, Culture, and Afro-Virginian Identity. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser Jr., 88–107. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Gums, Bonnie 1988 Archaeology at French Colonial Cahokia. Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Springfield. Hawkins, Meredith 2007 The Janis-Ziegler Site (23SG272): The Archaeological Investigation of a Houselot in a French Colonial Village. Master’s thesis, Illinois State University. Houck, Louis 1909 The Spanish Regime in Missouri: A collection of papers and documents relating to upper Louisiana principally within the present limits of Missouri during the Dominion of Spain, from the Archives of the Indies at Seville, etc., Translated from the original Spanish into English, and including also some papers concerning the supposed grant to Col. George Morgan at the mouth of the Ohio, found in the Congressional Library, Vol. 2. R. R. Donnelly and Sons, Chicago. Johnson, C. 1974 Missouri-French Houses: Some Relict Features of Early Settlement. Pioneer America 6(2):1–11. Keene, David J. 2002 Beyond Fur Trade: The Eighteenth Century Colonial Economy of French North America as Seen from Fort De Chartres in the Illinois Country. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison. Kimball-Brown, Margaret 1991 Documents and Archaeology in French Illinois. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 78–84. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Kuehn, Steven R. 2010 Domestic Dining at French Colonial Sites in the American Bottom: Evidence from the Trotier (11S861) and Jarrot Nordique (11S1741) Sites in French Cahokia. Illinois Archaeology 22(1):227–239. Mazrim, Robert 2010 A Brief Summary of French Domestic Site Archaeology in Illinois, 1730– 1800. Illinois Archaeology 22(1):148–165. 2011 At Home in the Illinois Country: French Colonial Domestic Site Archaeology in the Midwest 1730–1800. Illinois State Archaeological Survey, Champaign. Miller, George L. 1980 Classification and Economic Scaling of Nineteenth Century Ceramics. Historical Archaeology 14(1):1–40. 1991 A Revised Set of CC Index Values for Classification and Economic Scaling of English Ceramics from 1787 to 1880. Historical Archaeology 25(1):1–25.

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Norris, F. Terry 1991 Ste. Genevieve, a French Colonial Village in the Illinois Country. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 133–148. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Orser, Charles E., Jr. 1998 Archaeology of the African Diaspora. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:63– 82. 2007 The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Rushforth, Brett 2003 “A Little Flesh We Offer You”: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France. William and Mary Quarterly 60(4):777–808. Russell, Aaron E. 1997 Material Culture and African American Spirituality at the Hermitage. Historical Archaeology 31(2):63–80. Samford, Patricia 2004 Engendering Enslaved Communities on Virginia’s and North Carolina’s Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Plantations. In Engendering African American Archaeology: A Southern Perspective, edited by Jillian E. Galle and Amy L. Young, 151–176. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Schroeder, Walter A. 2002 Opening the Ozarks: A Historical Geography of Missouri’s Ste. Genevieve District, 1760–1830. University of Missouri Press, Columbia. Scott, Elizabeth M. 1991 A Feminist Approach to Historical Archaeology: Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade Society at Michilimackinac. Historical Archaeology 25(4):42–53. Stewart-Abernathy, Leslie 2004 Separate Kitchens and Intimate Archaeology: Constructing Urban Slavery on the Antebellum Cotton Frontier in Washington, Arkansas. In Household Chores and Household Choices: Theorizing the Domestic Sphere in Historical Archaeology, edited by Kerri S. Barile and Jamie C. Brandon, 51–74. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Thomas, Brian W., and Larissa Thomas 2004 Gender and the Presentation of Self: An Example from the Hermitage. In Engendering African American Archaeology: A Southern Perspective, edited by Jillian E. Galle and Amy L. Young, 101–132. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Trexler, Harrison Anthony 1914 Slavery in Missouri: 1804–1865. Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University. Trimble, Michael K., Teresita Majewski, Michael J. O’Brien, and Anna L. Price 1991 Frontier Colonization of the Saline Creek Valley. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, 163–188. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.

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Walthall, John A. 1991 Faience in French Colonial Illinois. Historical Archaeology 25(1):80–105. Waselkov, Gregory A. 1997 The Archaeology of French Colonial North America. Guides to Historical Archaeological Literature 4:2–41. Wesler, Kit W. 1999 Archaeological Test Excavations at the Delassus-Kern House, Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Ohio Valley Historical Archaeology 14:67–88. 2004 Excavations at the Felix Vallé and Benjamin Shaw Houses, Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, 1998–1999. Murray State University. Submitted to the Felix Vallé State Historic Site. Copies available from the Felix Vallé State Historic Site, Ste. Genevieve, Mo. 2005 Exploring Assemblage Patterning in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Missouri Archaeological Society Quarterly 22(1):10–21. White, Sophie 2012 Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Whitson, Erin N. 2013 Identifying with the Help: An Examination of Class, Ethnicity and Gender on a Post-Colonial French Houselot. Master’s thesis, Illinois State University.

6 Access to First-Choice Foods and Settlement Failure at French Azilum Maureen Costura

Founded in 1793 on a bend in the Susquehanna River in what is now Bradford County, Pennsylvania, French Azilum was intended to be a refuge for aristocratic French men and women, a money-making venture, and a second attempt to fashion an ideal Enlightenment society along the lines that had failed in France (Figure 6.1). At its height in 1797 it had 300 to 400 individual residents, presumably not counting the enslaved, and around fifty structures, including houses, shops, mills, inns, a theater, and a church. Extended families of French and Saint-Domingan refugees came to Azilum in search of political stability and a fresh start. The settlers who built Azilum had all experienced warfare, violent trauma, and ongoing fear in the French and Haitian Revolutions, and in the process had lost access to important parts of their self-image and identity. The settlement at Azilum was proposed by the Asylum Company, a company of land speculators who wished to market lands in the United States to aristocrats and immigrants displaced by the ongoing revolutions on Saint-Domingue and in France, as well as other wealthy Europeans who might be displaced in future prophesied upheavals. The original directors of the company were Robert Morris, Louis de Noailles, and John Nicholson. Morris was a wealthy Philadelphian who had been known as the “Financier of the Revolution” for his role in advancing pay to keep Washington’s army in the field. His and his partner Nicholson’s heavy involvement in land speculation would ultimately ruin them and, according to some historians, lead to the passage of the nation’s first bankruptcy laws. Noailles was the brother-in-law of the Marquis de Lafayette and well known in early American high society circles.

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Figure 6.1. Map of Pennsylvania highlighting modern-day Bradford County. Map by author.

Although financial mismanagement and legal issues plagued French Azilum and its parent, the Asylum Company (1792–1819), the settlement did not experience the near-starvation and helplessness that plagued the French colonists at Gallipolis in Ohio. Unlike the similar Scioto Land Speculation Company at Gallipolis, the Asylum Company actually purchased the deeds for the settlement’s lands, at least in the intended urban areas. In fact, at the insistence of the French principals in the company, the land was purchased twice, once from the state of Pennsylvania and once from the state of Connecticut, which were disputing ownership of the area (Figure 6.2). Despite these safeguards, the settlement was not a long-term success. By 1803, the site was largely deserted, and by 1809 many of the buildings were in ruin. Most of the French returned to Europe, although a few married locally and stayed. The majority of the Saint-Domingans left Azilum for areas where their control of their enslaved people was supported by law, as it technically was not in Pennsylvania. The latter were also motivated by a desire to find land where their knowledge of plantation agriculture would be more applicable than it was in northern Pennsylvania. People of both groups left to take up positions in Napoleon’s Imperial government, or to try to recoup their fortunes in other business ventures. The enslaved left either with their owners or despite them as runaways.

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Figure 6.2. French Azilum as depicted in 1794 by the Comte de Maulevrier (de Colbert Maulevrier 1935).

After the departure of the French, the settlement vanished almost entirely. A few French names remained in the area, but largely the land was divided by two of the remaining settlers, Bartolomé Laporte and Charles Homet. Homet became the operator of the local ferry, while Laporte farmed. The Asylum Company closed its books officially in 1819. In 1836, Laporte’s grandson, a state senator, built his summer residence on the same plot of land, and most likely on the same foundations, as the earlier Grand Maison, the administrative hub of the French settlement. This structure is still standing (Figure 6.3). Although the records of the Asylum Company are extensive, they fail to reveal much information about the daily life of the various residents at the site. As Cynthia Robin (2013) has shown, it is through an understanding of daily choices and assumptions that individuals influence the ongoing viability of larger social structures. A few maps, the speculations or distant memories of settlers’ descendants, and the lists of lands bought and sold are all that remained of the briefly thriving community. The settlement has become wrapped in local legend, which declares it an intended refuge for Marie Antoinette or her children. These legends have led to the publication of several books of romantic fiction about the site. All of the novelizations of life at Azilum focus on the glamorous aspects and residents at Azilum, although they do depict life on the frontier as challenging, if more peaceful, than life in politically factional France.

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Figure 6.3. Image of the Laporte House ca. 1930 (Murray 1940).

This chapter examines the ways in which daily access to first-choice and previously normal food, and limited access to these first-choice foods, contributed to the feelings of want and alienation experienced by the French elite at Azilum. I also argue that these feelings of want eventually contributed to the end of the Asylum experiment. The history of archaeological excavations at French Azilum reflects the changing archaeological practices of the twentieth century. The heirs of Bartolomé Laporte kept the occasional relic of the settlement’s past, but were less than precise about documenting such finds or their contexts. Amateur excavations in 1956 resulted in the first documentation of the structure now called the “wine cellar,” later interpreted as a house for enslaved individuals. In 1976, the Pennsylvania Museum and Historic Commission carried out an excavation that further investigated the so-called wine cellar, revealing a second, matching basement and a series of other features in the close vicinity of the modern Laporte house, but which otherwise failed to turn up significant features. From 1999 to 2001 Binghamton University conducted a field school at the site, which unfortunately made use of unreliable maps compiled from earlier excavations. As a result, while the excavations turned up a significant amount of cultural material, they ended up reexcavating units from the 1976 dig, which had

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been filled by contractors who probably accidentally bulldozed a French period midden pile into an exposed foundation. While the complexity of past archaeological excavations can be hard to puzzle out, archaeologists need to keep in mind that we, too, are a significant part of site formation processes. Many excavators spend significant amounts of dig time scratching their heads and trying to read the minds of their precursors. There is also the issue that previous excavations on a site, depending on the antiquity of the excavation, may have disregarded or discarded what today would be considered valuable data. This was unfortunately the case at Azilum, where excavations prior to the 1970s discarded faunal and building remains in favor of keeping only the showiest artifacts. My own excavations comprised three field seasons from 2008 to 2010. During the first season, excavation focused on the area immediately adjacent to the 1830s Laporte House, which I suspected to have been built on the foundations of the earlier Grand Maison. An adjacent foundation was excavated, which we later confirmed to be the foundation of a kitchen wing that had burned in the nineteenth century. No diagnostic artifacts were found that could date the structure conclusively to the French period of occupation at the end of the eighteenth century, but when the dimensions of the kitchen wing were added to the still-standing structure, the Laporte House as a whole matched the dimensions recorded for the early Grand Maison. This is not proof of the antiquity of the house, but it is suggestive. During the second season, we excavated in the yard near the Laporte House where Warfel’s investigation in the 1970s had turned up a significant amount of artifacts and features, but no substantial foundations between the Laporte House and the structure we identified as a home for the enslaved (Warfel 1976). This yard yielded evidence of a footpath connecting the slave cottage with the present Laporte House, a post and beam structure, and a small quantity of heavily trampled plain rim creamware ceramics of the sort discussed in Hume (1991), which dates the site to the period of French occupation at the end of the eighteenth century and into the beginning of the nineteenth. This season also yielded a small but widespread amount of faunal remains, the study of which, when combined with previously excavated faunal remains and ceramic wares, comprises the material from which I base my arguments in the remainder of this chapter.

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My third field season involved extensive soil phosphate analysis, which confirmed the presence of two entrances and a swept yard area to the structure that was previously identified as the “wine cellar.” These findings prompted me to designate this structure as a habitation, while the lack of interior fireplace and the modest dimensions and discrete placement in the landscape prompted me to tentatively identify this structure as a slave cabin. The identity of those who dwelled in the different structures across the site is important, as it casts light on the food choices and necessities that drove those who made those choices. One of the key issues surrounding the understanding of food at Azilum is the extent to which food was actually available. To read the journals and letters of the settlers, food was difficult to come by, and the community was constantly on the edge of starvation. However, accounts by the disapproving American neighbors of Azilum tell of picnics, hunts, and dinners attended by visiting dignitaries such as dukes and princes of the ancien régime (Craft 1902; De Colbert Maulevrier 1935; Dupetit-Thouars 1800; Murray 1917; Murray 1940). These were seen as evidence of the “laziness” of the French, their lack of attention to the hard work necessary for prosperity, a stereotype familiar from other areas of the FrancophoneAmerican world (see Mann, this volume). Were the feelings of want experienced by the settlers referring to a physical lack of food, or to a desire for something else, such as status, familiarity, and safety? Were first-choice, familiar, and high-status foods available regularly, or was their acquisition rare and celebrated? In order to address these questions, it is necessary to first understand what foods were considered a normal and expected part of the diet of the elites at French Azilum, and what those foods meant to the inhabitants. There is a wealth of literature dealing with the development of French cuisine and eating habits around the time of the French Revolution (Chevallier 2007; Flandrin 2007; Pinkard 2009; Toussaint-Samat 2001; Trubek 2000). It was a time of immense change in an established cuisine, comparable to modern upheavals in eating habits caused by the globalization and industrialization of food systems. Among other innovations in French cuisine in the eighteenth century were the increased reliance on New World foods such as beans, corn, turkeys, and potatoes; the international trade in sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate; the inclusion of the dining room as a necessary addition to any middle-class residence; the

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invention of the restaurant; and the creation of courses in standard food service. Fine dining in the new style was seen as a new way for the aspiring socialite or upwardly mobile housewife to display his or her elite standing, with dining rooms as the new status item du jour. As Toussaint-Samat (2001:109) notes, “In the run-up to the Revolution the dining room became the great ambition of the petit bourgeois family, who had little entry in the halls of power, but imagined this sort of specialization as a necessity for the enjoyment of respectability.” Gourmands such as Brillat-Savarin (2009:69) raised dining to an art form, roundly declaring that “no man would dare assert that he had dined at a table where at least one truffled dish was wanting.” From 1784 to the 1820s a revolution in French dining was taking place, replacing elite private and bourgeois public dining with a true national obsession with gastronomy. The spread of political influence throughout the classes, and the new public life that so many partook of throughout this period, caused Frenchmen and women to take up breakfast parties, formal teas, political banquets, and restaurants, which were “completely new as an institution” according to Brillat-Savarin (2009:135). Gastronomy was considered as an emergent science, linked to medicine and behavioral changes, in which a person’s mood and mind could be influenced through his or her diet. The ancient theory of humors was still the underlying popular framework of medical practice at the end of the eighteenth century, although new developments had by this time largely displaced old understandings in the conscious minds of the elites. However, in folk and popular understandings, the humoral system still underlay a great deal of thought and decision making. Disease and imbalance arose when an individual acted in a way that deranged the natural balance of the humors. Food in turn could alter a person’s mood and mental state, as well as his or her state of health (Brillat-Savarin 2009:34). Hence access to first-choice foods was as much an issue of health and character as it was of personal taste. These issues of terroir and character made eating and food choice problematic for those at Azilum who had most recently come from SaintDomingue. The Saint-Domingans for the most part were those referred to as grands-blancs, the wealthiest and most elite of the island society. In the late eighteenth century, some researchers estimate that as much as an eighth of all French wealth derived from sugar agriculture on SaintDomingue (Popkin 2010), and the island was valued for the capital it

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could inject into upper-class French society. At the same time, however, the island was problematic for those very reasons of terroir. Just as the casta system in the Spanish colonies disallowed Creoles born in the New World from holding highest office, the French colonial elite lived in fear of what the Comte de Buffon called “colonial degeneracy” (Buffon 2008). The theory of colonial degeneracy claimed that individuals and species acclimated to European conditions could not thrive in the foreign conditions of the New World—that they would eventually become degenerate and withered. This presented a problem to wealthy Saint-Domingans that many overcame through maintaining an identity that was as “French” as it could possibly be. Their children were sent to France at a young age to be educated, and individuals could expect to maintain close ties on both sides of the Atlantic and travel back and forth several times in the course of a career. As a result, individuals at Azilum would have been deeply conscious both of the fashions and mores in France, but also of presenting an identity that was as void as possible of colonial degeneracy. This avoidance would have extended to food, as the preferences and dishes common to Saint-Domingue were relegated to the realm of the colonial. For example, according to the humoral system, a spicy food such as those favored by many in Saint-Domingue would cause both the bile and the blood of a person to rise, making them both aggressive and hospitable (Dessens 2007). These were considered the characteristic traits of the New World Creole, demonstrating to individuals at that time the accuracy of Buffon’s theory (2008). As food came out of the land, the terroir formed national and regional humors and therefore character, making each individual un homme or une femme de terroir. According to Brillat-Savarin (2009:35), the science of gastronomy was intended to understand in detail the ways in which individual foods and combinations of foods affected such emplaced individuals, to their betterment and that of society. The assumptions of class are also bound into this system. The wealthy had more delicate humors, which needed to be more carefully tended to avoid derangement and degeneracy. At the same time, elevated status was bound up in a display of rich and delicate foods, especially the high-status meat and game and the expensive and universally beneficial sugar. Access to these foods at Azilum would serve to cement social status and preserve the character of the individual in the face of a period of social and personal catastrophic change. Even when in financial difficulties, the elite French at Azilum continued to import and consume substantial amounts

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of sugar and other foods that involved sugar as an essential component such as chocolate, coffee, rum, and sweet wines. These first-choice foods acted not only to maintain health: through the humoral influences they brought to bear, they maintained the individual’s character, reinforced the individual’s place within society, and affirmed the individual’s deeprooted understanding of self. That such humoral theories still largely underlay popular thinking, if not published medical books, is shown by the treatments for yellow fever that were pursued in the 1790s by Dr. Benjamin Rush, who recommended blood-letting and purges to reduce the preponderance of blood and bile in the victim, which he believed were most intensely affected by the disease (Runes 2008). While the rationale given was not based explicitly on humoral theory, the treatment and the effects were extremely similar. The fact that the disease was widely believed (although not by Dr. Rush, who claimed that it was generated in Philadelphia) to have come with the Saint-Domingan refugees also highlights the connection to the supposed humors of the tropics—that is, blood and bile, which were associated with hospitality, hotheadedness, and courage, as well as yellow fever (Runes 2008). The French from Saint-Domingue both were and carried an infection into the body of the United States. At the same time as these gastronomic and medical revolutions were taking place, famine was prevalent throughout France, with bread riots commonplace. The eruption of Mt. Laki in 1783–1784 caused crop failure throughout much of the following decade, prompting widespread social unrest, often a symptom of rapidly and unpredictably rising food costs (Thordarson and Self 2003). Diet and access to food are as much implicated in the upheavals of the French Revolution as political motivations. Given the extent to which food preferences were considered to be bound up in character, status, and the maintenance of security, it is no wonder that food was a fraught subject for those at Azilum who had just lost all of the other “natural” advantages of birth and class. The contradictions between the food culture claimed by the elite settlers of Azilum and that revealed by archaeology can be understood as an attempt to lay continued claim to an elite dietary status as well as an attempt to re-create the familiar and assert continued identity in changed circumstances. Fortunately for researchers, the elite at Azilum wrote and thought about food a great deal. According to the documentary record, which consists of diaries, letters, bills of lading from local merchants, and

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travelers’ accounts of the community, the French and Saint-Domingan elite universally deplored the lack of “meat,” which seems to have included beef and venison but excluded pork and possibly chicken. There was no meat unless you hunted venison, according to one potential settler, de Pontigibaud (De More de Pontgibaud 1898). The lack of meat was a major factor in his decision not to relocate from Philadelphia to Azilum, as he had been “all through that country, and forty acres would not support a cow” (De More de Pontgibaud 1898:131). The Duc de La RochefoucauldLiancourt, a noble visitor to the settlement, claimed that the cattle suffer much during that season [winter] for want of fodder. They are for the most part fed with turnips, gourds, and the straw of Indian corn. Both oxen and cows are of a very indifferent sort, as little attention has been paid to the breed of cattle brought hither by the settlers. . . . The bullocks, which are consumed in Azilum, are generally brought from the back settlements, but it is frequently found necessary to send thither for them. . . . A great scarcity of beef prevails at Azilum. (1800:95) Charles Bué Boulogne, the first agent for the Asylum Company at the settlement, also complains about the quality of the cattle sent to the settlement when he says, “The cows are exceedingly poor, and hardly give any milk” (Murray 1917:18). In other instances, various managers and inhabitants of Azilum ordered “fat bullocks” from the Hollenbeck trading post in what is now Athens, New York, or remonstrated against the quality of the animals sent to them (Murray 1917; Murray 1940). Beef was evidently a priority for the people at Azilum, and its lack appears to have weighed on them heavily, to the point of discouraging settlers from taking up residence (De More de Pontgibaud 1898). In the absence of fat cattle, venison appears to have been an acceptable substitute. Hunting was an upper-class pastime associated with ownership of the land in metropolitan France prior to the French Revolution. Unlike other areas of North America, which were inhabited by the voyageurs (see Nassaney and Martin, this volume), the French at Azilum had never hunted game from necessity, only as sport. Game has also historically been described as a favorite of the French at Azilum. As one American living near Azilum wrote, “The French settled here seem . . . to have no great inclination or ability to cultivate the earth, and the greater part of them have let their land at a small yearly rent to Americans, and amuse

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themselves with driving deer, fishing, and fowling” (Weld 1800:534). This preference for the foods of the leisured elite in France, and their lack of availability at Azilum, contributed greatly to the perceived lack of food testified to in almost every written source to have survived at Azilum. The documentary record is consistent in both lauding the importance of meat in the diet and decrying its lack of availability. It is certainly true that there have been few cattle bones, and absolutely no deer bones, identified in excavated contexts at Azilum (Kozub 2000). This is puzzling. Were these animals so scarce that their bones are nearly nonexistent? Why then are there records recording the purchase of bullocks for the Grand Maison, located in the excavation area? Were all of these large meat animals slaughtered and dressed off-site, with only the meat making the journey to Azilum itself? This also seems unlikely. Deboning was not a regular feature of slaughter in the eighteenth century. What has been found consistently across the excavated contexts at the site are pig and chicken bones, and numerous gizzard stones (gastroliths) made out of creamware and shell-edged pearlware ceramics, testifying to the presence of poultry on-site around the period of French habitation. Both pork and chicken bones and related artifacts are found in every excavated context at Azilum, testifying to their omnipresence across the site, and contradicting the written claims of hunger. In addition to pork and chicken bones, we also excavated numerous wine bottles, as well as sherds from at least two creamware punch bowls that may have contained rum. It is possible that pork was in a different conceptual category for the settlers than red meat. This is supported by the fact that Brillat-Savarin (2009) discusses beef, poultry, turkey, game, fish, and even exotics like truffles and stimulants like sugar, coffee, and tea in The Physiology of Taste, but he does not grant pork any place in his categorization. In France today, varieties of saucisson, often but not invariably made with pork, are considered “the quintessence of the charcutier’s art and the most difficult to achieve because they rely so heavily on the ambient air and humidity” (Ruhlman and Polcyn 2005:171). They are sold through a charcuterie, which is defined as a store for smoked or cured meat products rather than a butcher. This divide holds true in France from the eighteenth century to today. However, the reason for this divide is not often addressed. Compared to other meats, preserved pork in a variety of forms has a relatively long use-life. It is possible that the dichotomy between “meat” and “pork” at Azilum may be linked to the differences in classifications given

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to preserved or processed meats such as saucisson or jambon de Bayonne (the French version of prosciutto) as opposed to fresh meats. But why weren’t these cured meats discussed by the French? For the theoretical consideration of pork products and their place in French gastronomy, we could turn to Lévi-Strauss (1969). The curing of pork, in which meat is transformed through application of controlled decay or hanging, may occupy a different position in the spectrums of raw to cooked and fresh to rotten than beef or venison, which were transformed through fire. Because pork was transformed through the application of air rather than heat, it may have partaken of a different set of humors than other meat products. Such an explanation could account for the ways in which the French and Saint-Domingan refugees at Azilum failed to discuss pork or cured meat products when discussing the absence of meat, but were clearly consuming them in relatively large quantities. Another, less theory-driven possibility is that the French were not eating pork at all. Most of the excavation done at Azilum to date is in the extended yard area of the Grand Maison, built to house the first on-site administrator of the settlement, and later rented by Azilum’s doctor, the Saint-Domingan slave owner Louis Buzzard (Costura 2011; La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt 1800:90). Many eighteenth-century plantation owners gave weekly portions of salt pork to their enslaved Africans as rations, and it is known that enslaved Africans were present in every Azilum household to occupy the current excavation area. The pig bones present on the site may reflect the continuation of the traditional slaves’ diet of pork and corn at Azilum. Whitson (this volume) also argues that the presence of gastroliths may indicate the use of a structure for chicken butchery by enslaved individuals. Given that both gastroliths and enslaved individuals are known to have been present across the site, there is nothing at Azilum to contradict that theory. This would also account for the reticence of the contemporary French and Saint-Domingan writers on the subject. Only a few period letters or documents refer to the presence of slaves at the site, and the question of their diet is never addressed in the documentary record. The hypothesis that the enslaved were important, if not primary, consumers of pork at Azilum would also account for a different disposal pattern. If a near-total lack of fish, beef, and game bones indicates that the French period middens have not yet been discovered, the presence of pig bones across the site contrarily indicates that these must have followed

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a different path from plate to trash. If meat, excluding pork, was a firstchoice food among the elite at Azilum, there is also evidence that they were selective in their choice of plant-based foods. At Azilum, faunal remains are valuable because they provide the best proxy for diet. In the absence of a palynological study, it is extremely difficult to know what nonfaunal foodstuffs were being consumed directly from the archaeological record. The French did not write much about what they themselves (or their enslaved Africans) were raising for the table. Aside from the turnips, gourds, and Indian corn mentioned by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (1800:95), and the wheat fields mentioned in a deed transferring land between two members of the settlement in 1797, written records that mention agriculture are sparse (Murray 1917). Much of the trade in comestibles must have been done independently with American neighbors and not formally through the Hollenbeck trading post at Tioga Point. Foods that were valued by the French are reflected in the reporting done by French diarists, who recorded the prices of common foodstuffs as a way of showing the related values of currencies. Moreau de St. Mery, for instance, lists the prices of food available in New York, including mackerel, green peas, strawberries, new potatoes, small cucumbers, beets, apples, pears, white eggplant, milk, cider, eggs, peas, butter, vinegar, sweet potatoes, lard, and French bread (1947:156– 157), which was made with wheat. Many of these items could have been grown at Azilum in small-scale kitchen gardens, which would leave little trace archaeologically. In a later section he goes on to discuss cherries, rum, Bordeaux brandy and wine, rice, oranges, sea bass, eels, crabs, beets, peaches, corn, watermelon, coffee, apricots, and onions (Moreau de St. Mery 1947:158–160). Clearly a wide variety of nonfaunal foods were appreciated and enjoyed by the French. Unfortunately, there are only a few records that reveal which of these delicacies were transported to Azilum, either as food staples or seed. Records focus on high-status imported items such as stimulants like coffee, tea, chocolate, and white sugar. Sugar in particular was a very important first-choice food, especially for settlers from Saint Domingue, where sugar producing accounted for virtually all of the wealth on the island and made it the highest valued colony in the French sphere of influence. Given the importance of sugar to the status and lifestyles of elite Saint-Domingans, it is not surprising that some of the Azilum settlers apparently attempted to adapt their knowledge to a new form.

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The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt writes that “maple sugar is made here in great abundance. Each tree is computed to yield upon an average from two pounds and a half to three a year. Molasses and vinegar are also prepared here. I have seen Messers. De Vilaine and Dandelot make sugar in this place, which much surpasses any of the same kind that has hitherto come under my observation” (1800:96). Although Rochefoucauld-Liancourt only mentions maple sugar, it is possible that the SaintDomingans at Azilum were using their enslaved workers to refine sugar beets. The process for refining sugar beets was discovered in 1740, and published in Berlin (Stein 1988:166). Although the first factory in France did not go into operation until 1802, the knowledge was potentially available to the Saint-Domingan planters at Azilum, who were clearly looking for some good or product that could take the place of sugarcane for these new, northern plantations. It is clear that the French at Azilum consumed these sweet goods; one of “the earliest recollections of Abraham Vanderpool (born in 1796) was Mr. Bec-de-lievre’s kindness in giving him raisins and candy” (Murray 1917:47). Records from Hollenbeck’s trading post, now available at the Tioga Point Historical Society, include entries for flour, corn, oats, buckwheat, potatoes, turnips, cabbages, beans, bread, and salt (Fry 1819). Another quoted bill of lading includes “1 Do. De Moutarde, 1. Tiercone de Sucré blanc, 4 Sacs Caffe, 1 do. Amidon (starch), 1. do Epicerie, 1 do. Thé, et 1 do. Vinegre” (Murray 1917:78). All of these are hardy goods that would travel well and are fairly indicative of what the pioneering settler would consume across America in the 1790s. Most people ate locally on a scale that is unimaginable even to the most dedicated locavore today. “It wasn’t until the Erie Canal opened in 1825 that Northern rural areas could give up bread made of corn-meal and rye in favor of wheat bread from imported flour” (Larkin 1988:175). The French clearly were not amenable to such substitutions from their customary diets, as is evidenced by Paul d’Autremont’s purchase of 100 bushels of wheat at 30 cents per bushel in Tioga Point, New York (Murray 1917:77). Cornmeal or rye bread was obviously simply unacceptable to the French. Such preferences are strong indicators of adherence to an economic or ethnic identity, as has been proved in several studies (Armstrong 1990; Deetz 1996; Voss 2008). Prior to 1800, most people in America, like much of the world, relied on seasonal meat or cheese and bread. Starches such as bread, rice, or

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potatoes formed the underpinning of most diets, with meat as a topping reserved largely for the rich and vegetables as a less-valuable afterthought (Larkin 1988:174), when they occurred at all. This may not have been the case with the French, who had an affinity for salads, according to BrillatSavarin (2009). His story of the Frenchman who became wealthy during his Revolutionary exile in England by preparing “salats” for fashionable British aristocrats is amusing but also indicative of the culture of cuisine at the time. The French at Azilum did value green foods, as evidenced by Edward Culver’s claim to the Asylum Company for payment relating to his journey from Tioga Point into the woods “for trobl of getting half Bushel of peas for vittles and Logging to one of your [Talon’s] men” (Murray 1917:75). Other American accounts of the settlement focus on the care given to the kitchen gardens and orchards that were both a source of fresh foods and beauty (Weld 1800). Some of these gardens were very extensive. For instance, by 1797 Sophia de Sibert’s garden contained 900 apple trees, as testified in the deed conveying her property to Gui de Noailles (Murray 1917:35). Also included in these gardens were probably provisioning grounds for the site’s enslaved individuals, as was common at many French colonial settlements throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Hardy, this volume). At French Azilum, issues of the continuity of identity and character were negotiated daily both within and on the boundaries of the community. The perceived lack of the foods necessary to maintain the humoraland terroir-based identities of the settlers placed those wishing to assert an elite identity at a disadvantage. Those forced to eat foods that they considered either unsafe or unworthy of their elite status were in danger of undergoing a change in their very characters, of becoming “colonially degenerate” in Buffon’s parlance. Under those circumstances, continued complaints about the lack of “proper” food, especially meat and sugar, would have reassured both the elites at Azilum and those with whom they corresponded that their desires and hence their essential natures were unchanged by time, locale, and circumstance. Compared to the trauma of the uprisings experienced by the elite settlers at Azilum, lack of access to certain preferred foods may appear trivial, and hardly a reason to abandon a thriving settlement. And indeed, the lack of access to first-choice foods was probably not the decisive factor that led to Azilum’s collapse. The anti-enslavement laws of Pennsylvania, the difficulty in adapting aristocratic and planter skills to make a living,

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the strange climate, and the possibility of reclaiming former glory probably drove people away to a greater extent than not liking the available local foods. However, while Azilum served as a harbor for the dispossessed, food was high up on the list of concerns that individuals voiced. The desired foods served as a metaphor for other hungers and discontents. For the aristocratic settlers at Azilum to abandon their hunger for the high-status and desirable foods of home was to accustom themselves to the unpalatable present.

References Cited Armstrong, Douglas V. 1990 The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme 2009 The Physiology of Taste, Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Tra Edition. Merchant Books, New York. Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de 2008 Buffon’s Natural History of the Globe, and of Man, Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, and Insects. Corrected and enlarged by John M. Wright. Bibliobazaar Reproduction Series, Bibliolife, Charleston, S.C. Chevallier, Jim 2007 The Queen’s Coffee and Casanova’s Chocolate: The Early Modern Breakfast in France. In Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900, edited by Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan, 191–208. Lexington Books, New York. Costura, Maureen 2011 French Azilum: Crossroads of Revolutions. Ph.D. diss., Cornell University. Craft, Rev. David 1902 A Day at Asylum: Manuscript letter read before the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society on November 14, 1902. Manuscript on file at the Tioga Point Historical Society, Athens, Pa. De Colbert Maulevrier, Comte 1935 Voyage Dans l’Intérieur des Etats-Unis et au Canada, 1798. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Deetz, James 1996 In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. Anchor Books/Doubleday, New York. De More de Pontgibaud, Charles-Albert 1898 Memoires Du Comte De Moré (1788–1837) Avec Cinq Héliogravures. Alphonse Picard et Fils, Paris.

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Dessens, Nathalie 2007 From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Dupetit-Thouars, Aristide-Aubert. 1800 Vie, Lettres, Voyages, Memoirs et Opuscules D’Aristide-Aubert Du PetitThouars. Chez Mm. Denta, Delaunoy, Pelicier at Petit, Paris. Flandrin, Jean-Louis 2007 Arranging the Meal: A History of Table-Service in France. Translated by Julie E. Johnson. University of California Press, Berkeley. Fry, William 1819 Catalogue of the lands and stock of the Asylum Company: offered for sale at the Merchants’ Coffee House, in pursuance of the 21st article of association of the said company. Printed by William Fry, Walnut below Fifth Street, Philadelphia. Hume, Ivor Noël 1991 A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America. Vintage Books, New York. Kozub, Andrea Zlotucha 2000 Let Them Eat Steak: Zooarchaeology at French Azilum. Master’s thesis, Binghamton University. Larkin, Jack 1988 The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790–1840. Harper and Row, New York. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, François-Alexandre-Frédéric 1800 Travels through the United States of North America [electronic resource], the country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada, in the years 1795, 1796, and 1797; by the Duke de La Rochefoucault Liancourt. With an authentic account of Lower Canada. Printed by T. Gillet, for R. Phillips; sold by T. Hurst and J. Wallis, and by Carpenter and Co., London. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1969 The Raw and the Cooked. Harper and Row, New York. Moreau de St.-Mery, Mederic-Louis-Elie 1947 Moreau de Saint-Mery’s American Journey 1793–1798. Translated by Kenneth Roberts and Anna Roberts. Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y. Murray, Elsie 1940 Azilum: French Refugee Colony of 1793. Tioga Point Museum, Athens, Pa. Murray, Louise Welles 1917 The Story of Some French refugees and Their “Azilum,” 1793–1800. Tioga Historical Society, Athens, Pa. Pinkard, Susan 2009 A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine 1650–1800. Cambridge University Press, New York. Popkin, Jeremy D. 2010 You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. Cambridge University Press, New York. Robin, Cynthia

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Everyday Life Matters: Maya Farmers at Chan. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Ruhlman, Michael, and Brian Polcyn 2005 Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing. W. W. Norton, New York. Runes, Dagobert D., ed. 2008 The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. Philosophical Library, New York. Stein, Robert Louis 1988 The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. Thordarson, Thorvaldur, and Stephen Self 2003 Atmospheric and Environmental Effects of the 1783–1784 Laki Eruption: A Review and Reassessment. Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 108(D1):AAC 7-1–AAC 7-29. Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne 2001 Histoire de la Cuisine Bourgeoise du Moyen Âge À Nos Jours. Albin Michel, Paris. Trubeck, Amy 2000 How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Voss, Barbara 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. Warfel, S. G. 1976 A Report on the Excavations at French Azilum (36Br134). Report submitted to the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission. Harrisburg. Weld, Isaac 1800 Travels Through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797. John Stockdale, London. 2013

7 Pots Sauvage Plantation Pottery Traditions of Northwest Louisiana at the End of the Eighteenth Century David W. Morgan and Kevin C. MacDonald

Coincoin, “Colonoware,” and Creolization Marie-Thérèse Coincoin is a celebrated figure of Louisiana’s colonial past (e.g., Burton and Smith 2008; Jolivétte 2007:13; G. Mills 1977, 2013; E. Mills 2012; Morgan et al. 2006). She was an enslaved woman of African parentage who found freedom through an extended liaison with a French bourgeois, and began a local land-owning dynasty (see G. Mills 1977, 2013). Since 2001 we have undertaken a program of archaeological research on the Cane River properties of Coincoin and her children. One goal of this research has been to document the degree to which plantations owned by individuals of African descent differed in material culture and built environment from French-owned plantations. Our initial findings from work at Melrose plantation are detailed elsewhere (MacDonald, Morgan, et al. 2006; Morgan et al. 2006). Here, and in two other publications to date, we analyze salient aspects of our more recent work at Coincoin’s plantation, which she operated between 1787 and 1816 (Figure 7.1) (MacDonald and Morgan 2012; Morgan and MacDonald 2011).1 The research goal posed above fits within an older and more expansive attempt by archaeologists to understand the process of syncretism between Native Americans and the European and African diasporas of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, a topic also addressed in considerable detail by Loyer Rousselle and Auger in the present volume. Ceramics play a role in this broad inquiry, and in the archaeological discourse of

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Figure 7.1. Location of Coincoin plantation (known archaeologically as the Whittington site [16NA241]) in Louisiana. Map by authors.

the African diaspora they are lumbered with a particularly contentious terminology. Ivor Noël Hume (1962) coined the term “Colono-Indian ware” in 1962 for shell-tempered earthenware recovered from excavations at colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown, which he interpreted as Native American–made trade pottery. Leland Ferguson (1980, 1992) argued later with great effect that most of these ceramics were probably made by African slaves. There has been a more recent counterattack against this notion (e.g., Mouer et al. 1999). Objections turned upon documentary evidence

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and certain strong typological parallels of colonoware2 with indigenous wares of the contact period. Consequently, there has been a general retreat from making unsupported assumptions about the ethnic identity of colonoware potters in North America, and discourse has turned to colonoware as a “creolized” or culturally mixed phenomenon instead (e.g., Anthony 2002; Apter 2002; Dawdy 2000; Joseph and Zierden 2002; Loren 2000; Mullins 2008; Singleton and Bograd 2000). There has been relatively little conversation within archaeological circles, however, about the suitability of the semantic equation of creolization with “mixture,” although this has been the focus of critical debate by cultural anthropologists and historians for some years now (e.g., Munasinghe 2006; Stewart, ed. 2007). Stewart (1999, 2007) has been helpful in framing the debate. He illustrates how “creole” moved originally from a term in the past with pejorative meanings to one treated in contemporary social science theory as “an expressive buzzword used in concatenation with ‘syncretism,’ ‘hybridity,’ or ‘mixture’” with no apparent distinction among them (Stewart 2007:6). The same largely could be said for archaeological discourse, too. Like Palmié (2007) (and, in this volume, Loyer Rousselle and Auger, Pendery, and others), we consider creolization to be a particularistic process in which novel cultural elements derived from cultural trajectories are negotiated among multiple actors, each operating under a variety of constraints, ranging from resource access to social power dynamics. In our view, “original” cultures are not passively “lost” over time. Select elements are renegotiated within the limits of these constraints as actors struggle to redefine and reaffirm new identities within new circumstances. The particularistic nature of creolization is especially apparent when multiple cultural actors enter “play” at the same time, such as individuals from multiple ethnicities from across Europe, Africa, or Native America. Indeed, as has been argued elsewhere—including our co-contributors in this volume—it is remarkable that colonoware could be treated by archaeologists as a unitary phenomenon, considering the unique local circumstances and cultural composition of every colonial New World settlement/plantation network (Haviser and MacDonald 2006:2–3). French Louisiana was a particularly fertile ground for creolized cultural phenomena, with arguably more autonomous communities of African descent and a longer association with Native American communities than was the case for other Deep South or East Coast Anglophone

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communities. The 1810 Census of Louisiana shows that 18 percent of those judged to be of African descent (“Negroes”) were free (Berlin 1974:Table 4). This is as compared to 1.3 percent in Mississippi, 2.3 percent in South Carolina, or 7.2 percent in Virginia. Although, according to Burton and Smith (2008), Natchitoches free people of color (10.9 percent in 1810) were proportionally less numerous than elsewhere in the state, their community was more concentrated with a cluster of “free black” plantations forming in the Isle Brevelle (south of Natchitoches) from the 1790s onward. Additionally, as in other frontier French-speaking areas, the enslaved around colonial Natchitoches enjoyed relatively greater autonomy: hunting independently with muskets, herding livestock, owning valuables, and trading goods in local markets (Burton and Smith 2008:69–70). Regarding Native Americans, as Daniel Usner (1992, 1998) has illustrated, the French colony of Lower Louisiana differed from the English colonies on the eastern seaboard in three fundamental economic and social respects: until the late 1700s Indians outnumbered non-Indians in Louisiana by a factor of five to one; poorly subsidized Louisiana developed a dependence on local trade for subsistence and material needs; and northwest Louisiana’s frontier location permitted great fluidity in interaction and exchange between various groups. Contra Burton and Smith (2008:105), who argue that the Indian trade faded in the late eighteenth century, it remains apparent that there remained significant ongoing commerce with local Native Americans as late as the first three decades of the 1800s (Sibley 1832, 1922; Byrd 2008). For example, the notes and diary entries of John Sibley, Indian Agent in the Natchitoches territory, frequently record Native Americans coming into Natchitoches with a wide variety of merchandise during this period: “Arriv’d a Party of Caddos to trade” and “Arriv’d a party of Alibamis from the Conchetta Village on Red River, with a quantity of skins to trade in the factory” (Sibley 1922:13, 25). Sibley’s (1832) accounts also speak of Native American women vending pots in the town at this time. The local level of indigenous commerce alluded to in Sibley’s accounts was so important that stores in Natchitoches went out of business at the time of Caddo removal in the 1830s (Kniffen et al. 1987:96). Thus, in the present study we use historical and archaeological data to identify the broad range of cultural traditions and trajectories that may have made a contribution to the colonoware assemblage present at the

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Coincoin plantation between 1788 and 1816. Accordingly, this is a study of a limited group of cultural actors in about as fine a time slice as archaeology can practically manage. Yet even such a narrow focus produces a prodigious web of possible contributors. In order to disentangle it, we consider the decorative and technical attributes of this colonoware assemblage against preexisting Native American traditions, identifying novel aspects that may have been introduced via historical, multiactor syncretic processes, or “creolization.”

Historical Background to Cane River: 1780s–1810s The sustained colonial presence in the vicinity of what would later become the Coincoin plantation began in 1713 when Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac, the colonial governor, sent Juchereau de St. Denis up the Red River with his allies to prevent Spanish incursion into the French territory and to establish trade with Spain’s New Mexico (Byrd 2008). The storehouse St. Denis erected soon gave way to a larger fort, anchoring the Natchitoches community as a pivotal point in the frontier landscape. Fort St. Jean Baptiste became a locus of interaction and cultural syncretism between numerous groups, including Native Americans, Spanish, French, and Africans. By the late 1700s new identities had developed out of the area’s multiethnic communities and households (Burton and Smith 2008). One such development included the formation of the modern Cane River “Creole of Color” community. The relatively well documented eighteenth-century intercultural relationships of the Natchitoches area make an intriguing, complex backdrop for examining colonowares. At the heart of the study—following a similar route as colonoware studies on the East Coast—is a basic question: who made this pottery? Unlike on the East Coast, where the very presence of Native Americans as potential makers of colonoware is debated (e.g., Deetz 1999; Mouer et al. 1999), there is no doubt that Native Americans were very much a part of the daily cultural landscape in Louisiana, much as described by Nassaney and Martin (this volume) for the western Great Lakes region. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, resident Caddoan groups, including the Natchitoches, Yatasi, Doustioni, Kadohadacho, and Ouachita, occupied much of the region surrounding Natchitoches (Hunter 1985, 1994a, 1994b; Kniffen et al. 1987; Perttula 1997; Swanton 1911, 1946). By the 1760s and 1770s the Apalachee, Avoyel, Taensa, Chatot,

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and Alabamas had moved into the area south of Natchitoches along the Red River, which also hosted the Pascagoula and Biloxi during succeeding decades. The overwhelmingly indigenous character of Louisiana’s population ended by the 1830s, due to the removal policy of Andrew Jackson and a surge of U.S. immigrants following the Louisiana Purchase. Not all Native Americans were expelled, however, and the area around and north of Natchitoches in particular became a refuge for many Choctaw, who entered into lands traditionally occupied by Caddoan peoples (Kniffen et al. 1987). It was into this dynamic milieu that Coincoin was born in Natchitoches in 1742 to African-born parents, slaves of the post commandant, St. Denis (E. Mills 2012). In the past, it has been asserted that she may have been of Glidzi (Ewe) ancestry (E. Mills 2008:261; G. Mills 1977:3), but a current reinvestigation of naming evidence strongly suggests Bakongo ancestry for Coincoin and her four siblings.3 In 1767, at the age of twenty-four, Coincoin was rented to a French bachelor merchant, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, then newly arrived at Natchitoches post, with whom she maintained a plaçage relationship for approximately twenty years (E. Mills 2012). Together they had ten children (E. Mills 2012; G. Mills 1977). Metoyer manumitted Coincoin in 1778, and she remained with him until shortly before he took a legal French wife in 1788 (E. Mills 2012; G. Mills 1977). Sometime in 1787 Coincoin began the legal process to acquire a tract of 80 arpents of land (ca. 67 acres), as part of what was effectively a separation agreement (G. Mills 2013:36). Land registry in colonial Louisiana was sometimes a chaotic process. Archival work by Elizabeth S. Mills (2012:417–421) has recently brought to light a conflict of permission to develop Coincoin’s property, leading to one J. B. Delouche being present on this land briefly between summer 1785 and an unknown date in 1787 or 1788. The August 1787 census shows his presence to have been a small one, consisting of Delouche, his wife, and infant son, with no slaves and only two head of livestock (E. Mills 1981:54). We mention this as Mills (2012:421) has cautioned that this presence by Delouche might “affect the archaeological interpretation of artifacts found there.” This is a matter to which we will return. So, in 1788, at the age of forty-six, Coincoin embarked on a new career as an independent plantation owner. She owned at least twelve slaves over the roughly three decades she ran her plantation. These included at least one adult of “Kissi nation,” two adults of “Kongo nation,” and their nine

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Louisiana-born children (MacDonald, Morgan, and Handley 2006:128– 129; E. Mills 2008:264). By 1806/1807, Coincoin apparently had retired from farming and had effectively turned over her 67 acres to her newly freed son, Pierre Metoyer Jr. (G. Mills 2013:53; E. Mills 2012:412).4 The 1810 Natchitoches Parish Census shows Pierre Metoyer Jr. living with five other free individuals of color (in terms of age distributions one of these is almost certainly Coincoin) and twelve slaves. In 1816, Coincoin settled the rest of her estate via property transfers to her children and sold her plantation (G. Mills 2013:55; E. Mills 2012:422). The area then became incorporated into adjoining larger plantations of St. Anne and John Prudhomme as farmland and saw relatively limited building activity up to the present day (DeBlieux File, Cammie G. Henry Archives, Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Natchitoches).

Fieldwork Summary: 2001–2007 In 2001, we began field investigations at Coincoin’s 1788 plantation site. Fieldwork that year and in 2002 revealed the location of eighteenth-century structures and domestic debris (MacDonald, Morgan, and Handley 2002/2003, 2006; MacDonald, Morgan, et al. 2006). From 2005 to 2007, we excavated in this residential core. Systematic geophysical survey— primarily fluxgate gradiometry and ground-penetrating radar—guided placement of units at other nearby locations.5 By the end of the project we had excavated 147 m2 in large and small blocks, resulting in the exposure of numerous features, the most salient of which for this discussion are two structures and an associated 3-m diameter trash-filled pit. The structures consist of the remains of a wooden cabin anchored to the ground by a series of posts, and the wall collapse and foundation bases of a ca. 6 × 12 m rectangular dwelling built of rammed-earth (Figure 7.2) (MacDonald and Morgan 2012). We believe the two were built sequentially, based on their stratigraphic positions. The cabin is oldest, and conjecturally may have either been built by the Delouche family in 1785 (see above) or by Coincoin as an initial dwelling around the time of Pierre Metoyer’s marriage in 1788. In size and layout it conforms to other late eighteenth-century colonial cabanes (wooden cabins) described in local documents as having been anchored to the ground with widely spaced posts and sheathed with a frame of vertical wooden planks that were nailed on, not embedded in the ground (Wells 1973). The more substantial

Figure 7.2. Remains of maison pièce sur pièce (posts in the southeast), rammed-earth dwellings (wall base and melt), and midden. Map by authors.

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adjacent rammed-earth dwelling was built afterward. Its orientation and location correspond well to a survey map of the property produced by Pierre Maes in 1794, which depicts a single structure labeled as Coincoin’s maison. We have argued elsewhere (MacDonald and Morgan 2012) that this rammed-earth structure, with timber supports only for its roof, is not typical of recorded colonial-era architecture in northern Louisiana and may have parallels in its construction with historical built forms in southern Nigeria. Midden debris adjacent to the rammed-earth structure filled a wide but shallow (ca. 25 cm deep) depression in the footprint of the older cabin. It is clear that the midden postdates the cabin as it in-fills the voids left by the cabin’s pulled posts, showing that the midden remained active or formed immediately after the temporary cabin was disassembled. The stratigraphy within the pit attests to multiple alluvial and depositional events, suggesting the pit was left open for some time, probably across several seasons. To recap: (1) the cabin was built and used sometime between 1785 and 1787 (if the Delouche dwelling), or between 1787 and 1794 (if built by Coincoin); (2) it was deconstructed, and a rammed-earth building was constructed adjacent to the former cabin by 1794; and (3) plantation residents dumped their debris into an adjacent shallow pit feature for a few years beginning no later than 1794, but certainly no earlier than 1787. Even if we were to interpret the small cabin as the Delouche dwelling, perhaps initially co-opted and then dismantled by Coincoin, the brief stay of this small family unit (of two adults and an infant) is unlikely to have made a substantial contribution to this locale’s archaeology over two years, especially when contrasted with Coincoin’s working plantation occupied by some thirteen to twenty-four people (counting Coincoin, all of her known slaves, and Coincoin’s children) over a twenty-eight-year period. Much of the pottery that forms the focus of this chapter derives from the midden that infilled the footprint of the initial cabin structure and its immediate surroundings, so it is useful to provide additional details on its contents and age. The midden pit was replete with domestic debris, including abundant bone from domestic and nondomestic animals, pottery, ash, and charcoal. Glass and brick were notably scant, but their absence supports our interpretation of this as a Coincoin-era pit, since window glass and brick chimneys were rare at all but the richest residences

Plantation Pottery Traditions of Northwest Louisiana · 163

around Natchitoches until the early nineteenth century (Wells 1973). Of the fifteen nails from this feature intact enough to allow identification (following Edwards and Wells 1993), all are types that predate 1810. The 773 pottery vessel fragments recovered from the pit support the nail ages. More than a third of the sherds—43.6 percent (n=337)—are colonoware, a pottery type largely absent from Cane River plantations postdating the 1830s (Morgan and MacDonald 2011). Another 51.0 percent are wares that also were in production only prior to or during the life of Coincoin’s plantation. The most numerous examples include English creamwares (25.1 percent) and pearlwares (12.4 percent), which were produced between 1760 and 1810 and between roughly 1770 and 1830, respectively, although Dawdy (2000:116) cautions that neither was universally available and affordable in Louisiana until after the Spanish lifted an embargo on river trade with the United States in the 1790s. The next most common type of pottery found in the pit was European tin-enameled wares, especially the French faience type Rouen Plain (12.4 percent), which were the primary imported tablewares of the colony until the advent of the more fashionable and durable refined wares. The range of excavated materials thus indicates that this midden was probably in use during the 1790s and into the first decade of the nineteenth century. Excavations at the plantation overall produced a ceramic assemblage of 3,373 sherds. The relative contribution of colonowares to this number echoes that of the midden pit: colonowares make up 40.2 percent (n=1,357). While, as mentioned above, the midden proper produced 337 colonoware sherds, another 474 colonoware sherds were found in the units surrounding the shallow pit feature, from which the artifacts had been scattered by decades of mule-drawn plowing. Combining these samples, it is apparent that roughly 60 percent of the 1,357 colonoware specimens in the overall assemblage of 3,373 sherds originated in this particular midden deposit. In this study we used only those sherds larger than 1.28 cm (0.5 in) (n=479).6 Of these sherds, 95.2 percent derived from the midden pit (n=157) and surrounding area (n=322). Thus, the results presented here largely are an analysis of this particular context, which offers us a snapshot of a colonoware assemblage likely associated with Coincoin’s plantation dwelling in the first decade or two of her ownership (ca. 1790–1810).

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Ceramics of Northwest Louisiana Where does this particular vignette fit within the larger colonoware spectrum of northwest Louisiana? As alluded to earlier, colonoware use declined over time, and a previous study of unpublished archaeological reports suggests that in the late 1700s and early 1800s colonowares made up less than 20 percent of the pottery found at Afro-European plantation and homestead sites in Natchitoches and the surrounding region (Morgan and MacDonald 2011). This echoes trends on the East Coast, in which nonlocal ceramics and iron cooking pots had largely replaced colonowares by the start of the Civil War (Wheaton 2002:39). Historic records lend a documentary dimension to our study of local colonowares. For instance, the succession inventories recorded in Natchitoches Parish between 1780 and 1810 list 2,302 pottery vessels, of which 81 (3.5 percent) were described as terre sauvage or pots sauvage (that is, “savage fabric” or “savage pottery”), an epithet that apparently implies a Native American origin but which also could include African-made vessels (Handley et al. 2006). These 81 consisted mostly of jugs (cruches) and medium to large storage pots (jarres). In summary, low quantities of colonoware were consistently present in urban and rural homesteads and plantations in the Natchitoches region at the turn of the nineteenth century, before mostly disappearing from the material record by around 1830 (Morgan and MacDonald 2011). Native Americans, as mentioned above, were a ubiquitous part of the northwest Louisiana cultural landscape in the years surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century, but their communities or homes are underresearched. The sparse archaeological work done suggests that the colonoware ratios at the places where Native Americans lived are subtly different. Drawing on work done at the Sha’chahdínnih, Biloxi Village, and Zimmerman Hill sites (Kadohadacho confederacy, Biloxi, and Apalachee associations, respectively), it appears that colonowares at roughly coeval Native American occupations near Alexandria, Louisiana—some 97 km south of Natchitoches—make up on average around 75 percent of the pottery collections (Hunter 1985, 1994a, 1994b; Parsons et al. 2002). This quantitative difference between Afro-European and Native American contexts may, in part, reflect the ethnic makeup and preferences of the sites’ occupants, as well as differential economic access to refined earthenwares. It is intriguing that the Coincoin assemblage, which is overwhelmingly African in its

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ethnic affiliation, appears to fall between colonial Euro-African and late eighteenth-century Native American sets of colonoware frequencies (at 40.2 percent). The most sizable comparative collection of colonowares elsewhere in northwest Louisiana derives from work conducted at the 1716 to 1773 Spanish presidio Nuestra Señora del Pilar de los Adaes. Hiram F. Gregory and his colleagues have provided an overview of the history of the fort and of the unpublished archaeological excavations spanning the 1970s to 1990s (Avery 1995; Gregory et al. 2004). More than 30,000 colonoware sherds make up 85 percent of the ceramic assemblage from the presidio. Most are fragments of bowls and jars. Some replicate European forms, such as shallow brimmed bowls and pitchers, and some replicate European vessel attributes, such as ring bases. The majority of these colonowares are attributed by the excavators to the Caddo, with some 1 percent notionally deriving from the Natchez, Choctaw, or Mexican/Texas traditions. Despite being a vastly larger, slightly older, and nominally Spanish collection of material, the frequency of colonowares at Los Adaes is analogous to that at the Native American sites near Alexandria discussed previously, which is not surprising given the number of Caddo surrounding Los Adaes and the well-documented intermarriage of Spanish soldiers with Caddo women (Avery 1995; Gregory et al. 2004; Loren 2000).

Coincoin Ceramics Analytical Approach As alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, the last two decades have witnessed a surge in research involving colonowares. The research is occurring alongside a debate about the validity of using the creolization process as a potential theoretical platform for understanding New World plantation contexts. Nevertheless, researchers continue to make many uncritical assumptions about low-fired coarse earthenwares of local manufacture (see Morgan and MacDonald 2011). Ideally, one would hope to make an attribute-based study of collections to document their internal variability and levels of correspondence with other similar assemblages, to show connections, ambiguity, or difference. To parse out and study the observable variety in the Coincoin collection, we have systematically recorded vessel form, temper, thickness, surface treatment, and firing

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environments. Additionally, our initial visual classification was complemented by a petrographic analysis by Julia Tubman (2008). Regarding firing environments, we followed Rye’s (1981:118) firing core types to infer a vessel’s firing atmosphere. However, we restricted our observations to surface and core colors, without attempting to categorize core margins as sharp or diffuse (used by Rye to infer the presence or absence of organics). Even so, restricting the matrix yields eight possible oxygen atmosphere observations, related as numeric codes. We believe that many of these differences are due simply to the vagaries of pot placement within an open-pit firing environment, although certain cores such as fully reduced (black) varieties (Code 4) may represent specific firing strategies. Rims and Vessel Forms We began with an analysis of twenty-four rims whose preserved lip lengths exceeded 1.5 cm (Table 7.1). We established six rim classes (A–F) with one variant (E’) (Figure 7.3). All the classes are necessarily tentative, with the exception of Class A, which is visually distinct and numerically dominant (see below). As part of the rim study we also derived five categories of overall vessel shape based on rim angle: shallow bowls (25–45°); bowls (46–80°); beakers (81–100°); closed vessels (101–135°); and tightly closed vessels (136–150°). Shallow bowls (n=10) and bowls (n=8) were the most common vessel shapes in our sample, followed by beakers (n=3), tightly closed pots (n=2), and a single closed specimen. Given the small sizes of the sherds it was often difficult to reliably estimate internal rim diameter; however, it is safe to observe that these are all relatively small vessels, with no rim diameters exceeding 28 cm. Rim Class A—Bowls and Shallow Bowls Class A consists of everted, folded rims with rounded lips, which we identified on twelve specimens. The class occurs mostly on coarse shelltempered pots whose diameters ranged from 10 to 28 cm, with a median value of 18 cm. Their firing cores varied widely. As with bowls and shallow bowls associated with other rim classes, their limited depth, open orifice, and small diameters would suggest serving wares or tablewares. However, it is worth noting that one-quarter of the specimens exhibit interior and

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Table 7.1. Summary of Twenty-Four Colonoware Rim Data Average Average Average Number Thickness Angle Diameter of Vessels (mm) (degrees) (cm) A

Vessel Shape

Rim Class Assoc. B

C

D

E

E1

F

Beaker

3

6.7

93.0

N/A

0

0

0

3

0

0

0

Bowl

8

5.9

59.4

17.3

4

4

0

0

0

0

0

Closed bowl Shallow bowl Tightly closed bowl

1

6.4

106.0

N/A

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

10

6.4

35.9

20.5

8

0

2

0

0

0

0

2

4.0

139.0

8.0

0

0

0

0

1

1

0

exterior soot deposits, so these vessels may also have served as cooking pots or were placed over fires to warm their contents. Rim Class B—Bowls Class B, of which there are four specimens, also occurs on simple, coarse shell-tempered bowls, but these lack an everted rim, exhibit a squared or rounded lip, and bear no soot. Only one internal diameter was observed: 18 cm, comparable to Type A. Three of the four have firing Code 1 (oxidized surfaces and core), and one has firing Code 4 (reduced surfaces and core). Rim Class C—Shallow Bowls Class C consists of only two specimens. The rims are rolled-lipped and occur on shallow bowls with coarse shell temper. One occurs on a sherd with firing Code 1 (oxidized surfaces and core) and the other vessel with firing Code 3 (oxidized exterior, reduced core and interior). Rim Class D—Beakers Class D consists of three vessels, all of which are near vertically sided, simple-rimmed beaker forms, conceivably usable as drinking vessels. Their lips are variable, including rounded, beveled, and squared forms. Two of the three are well burnished.

Figure 7.3. Rim Classes A–F. Figure by authors.

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Rim Classes E and E’—Tightly Closed Vessels Classes E and E’ are provisional classes each associated with a single sherd. Both represent tightly closed vessels with highly restricted orifices and a mildly everted lip. Both have an interior diameter of 8 cm. The Class E specimen is burnished on the interior, is tempered with coarse shell, and has a type 6 firing code (oxidized interior and core, reduced exterior), which is notable for its rare occurrence (10 sherds out of the 479 analyzed). The variant E’ is tempered with fine shell, exhibits firing Code 1, and is engraved. The two vessels represented by these classes are noticeably thinner than any of the others in the sample (3.5 and 4.5 mm). Both are small vessels one might use to hold salt, condiments, powder, or other relatively precious goods. Rim Class F—Closed Vessel Class F, which consists of a single specimen, represents a simple-rimmed, square-lipped form on a closed vessel fired in an oxygenated environment (firing Code 1), for which a rim diameter could not be obtained. Given its near vertical interior angle, the vessel exhibiting Class F could have been used to hold either liquid or dry goods. It is square lipped and was tempered with coarse shell.

*

*

*

The pit from which most of the sherds derive included animal bones, shell, the bone handles of cutlery, copious ash and charcoal, and the fragmentary vessels described above, all of which suggest the context represents debris from food preparation and consumption. Large-diameter and thick-walled vessels such as those that would be used for cooking are noticeably absent, as is clearly illustrated by a simple plot of all sherd thicknesses (Figure 7.4), and as the few internal diameter measurements also suggest. Even the largest outlying measurements are less than 1.1 cm. It also is apparent that there are no “natural” breaks in thickness that might correspond to functional differences. Presumably iron kettles were used in cooking, and the midden contains what appear to be broken serving or storage vessels, although the presence of soot on the Class A vessels cautions against overgeneralization. Such was also the case at the Yaughan and Curriboo plantations in South Carolina, for example, where over the span of the late 1700s and early 1800s iron kettles replaced colonoware

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Figure 7.4. Plot of 479 colonoware sherd thicknesses (mm). Figure by authors.

jars, and bowl forms and flatwares became predominant (Wheaton 2002:40). Regardless of their actual makers, the use of many of these vessels may conform to culinary practices in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where such small serving wares can serve as holders for sauces (Ferguson 1992:104–105). Decorated Types Seven percent (n=31) of the 479 analyzed sherds are decorated. The rarity of decoration is no surprise, as the frequency of decorated pottery diminished progressively in local contexts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Morgan and MacDonald 2011). The surface treatments of the thirty-one sherds from the Coincoin site consist of engraving, combing, slipping, and incising (Table 7.2). These were sorted into six categories based on decorative and ware attributes. Chickachae Combed Chickachae combed sherds exhibit fine-line incisions executed in bands of four to five by a potter’s comb, and all were found in contexts near but outside of the trash pit. This appears to be a Natchitoches variant of that described from the Choctaw homeland (Blitz 1985; Collins 1927; Galloway 1995; Haag 1953; Voss and Blitz 1988), as the latter occurs on sand or mixed shell-sand-grog-tempered pastes, while these sherds are tempered with coarse shell, bone, or nothing. Bone-tempered examples are known locally from other sites in Natchitoches Parish, and the untempered specimen has parallels with what Hunter and colleagues (1997:249) describe as

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Table 7.2. Decorated Types at the Coincoin Plantation No. Sherds by Firing Thickness Atmosphere No. Min. No. Thickness min.–max. No. Sherds Sherds Vessels Ave. (mm) (mm) w/Soot 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Type Chickachae Combed Natchitoches Engraved Unclass. Black Slipped Unclass. Engraved Unclass. Incised Unclass. Red Slipped

5

3

5.8

5.1–7.1

0

3 0 0 2

0 0 0 0

9

3

5.0

4.2–6.0

0

6 3 0 0

0 0 0 0

2

2

6.1

4.1–8.5

0

0 0 0 2

0 0 0 0

3

1

6.0

3.5–7.3

0

2 0 0 0

0 0 0 1

7

1

6.1

5.3–8.2

0

4 0 0 2

0 0 1 0

5

2

5.9

5.3–7.8

0

0 0 0 2

0 0 3 0

the dense, uniform, and temperless “Chickachae paste.” In terms of firing atmospheres, the interiors, exteriors, and cores of the bone-tempered specimens were reduced, while the coarse shell specimens and the untempered sherd were oxidized. Examples of this type have been found at Los Adaes, Tauzin-Wells, and other sites in the local area. Gregory and Avery (2006) correlate this type in northwest Louisiana with historically documented settlements of the Adaes, Apalachee, Choctaw, Coushatta, Natchez, Natchitoches, and Yatasi. Natchitoches Engraved The sherds we identified as Natchitoches Engraved show “classic” attributes of the type (Suhm and Jelks 1962:113–114; Webb 1945:63–64), especially zoned areas of engraved, fine-line cross hatching bounded by engraved scrolls of empty space, one of which features a “tic” marked border. All sherds were tempered exclusively with fine shell, and most exhibit a brown exterior slip. Natchitoches Engraved is associated with the historic period Caddoan tribes in the Natchitoches area, as well as with the Natchez, Choctaw, Apalachee, and Coushatta (Gregory and Avery 2006). Unclassified Black Slipped Only two sherds exhibit black slipping in the absence of other surface treatments; one is tempered with coarse shell, the other with sand and fine

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shell. An unmistakable slip has been applied to the exterior of the latter, and to the interior and exterior of the former. On a macroscopic level, during the initial analysis we noted that the paste was very fine, dense, and compact, and thus different from anything else observed. Under magnification it is apparent that the paste includes biosilicates, which also is unique for the assemblage and may contribute to the distinct appearance and feel of the ceramic body (Tubman 2008). The closest analogs in the literature on historic Native American wares for this type again comes from Hunter’s and his colleagues’ (1985; 1997) work at Zimmerman Hill, and Huffman Creek, a former Chacto village. Hunter (1985:91–93) defined Zimmerman Black, var. Zimmerman, which he characterized as simple, unrestricted bowls with interior black-filming whose sherds are easily sorted by their fine-shell-tempered paste, extreme friability, and well-smoothed/polished surfaces. He suggests this is a “foreign introduction into the area,” with possible parallels elsewhere in the Southeast. Hunter and colleagues (1997:249) tentatively defined another black slipped type—Chickachae Black—based on a single sherd with a “Chickachae paste,” that is, untempered. Neither adequately describes the black slipped sherds from the Whittington site. Unclassified Engraved/Incised Sherds The unclassified engraved and incised types are residual categories of sherds for which we were unable to deduce the arrangement or orientation of the lines on the vessel. Unclassified Red Slipped A red slip was applied to the interior and sometimes to both surfaces of five otherwise undecorated sherds. The five are tempered with coarse or fine shell, which crosscuts two different firing atmospheres: 4 (reduced surfaces and core) and 7 (oxidized surfaces and reduced core). The slip itself is very distinct from the shell-tempered bodies. It appears to have been made as a slurry mixing dense quantities of clay with a colorant (red ocher) and a binding agent. Associating these with defined Native American wares is problematic, although there are a number of relatively local red slip types. Some nearby geographical possibilities include Chickachae Red (Hunter et al. 1997) and Old Town Red, var. Rapides (Hunter et al. 1997; Hunter 1985). Other notable red slipped parallels derive from lower Mississippi Valley

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classifications (Brain 1988:344, 360; Phillips 1970:98–99; Williams and Brain 1983:167–169), and farther abroad in the historic period there are still others. To complicate matters, it must be borne in mind that red slipping is extremely common to historic West African ceramic traditions and thus may also derive from African hands. Paste, Thickness, and Firing Three primary temper materials—bone, sand, and shell—were identified in the collection. Some sherds visually replete with argillaceous quartz appear to have been purposely selected from sand-rich clay sources, eliminating the need for additional temper (Tubman 2008). Additional subdivisions in our paste classification were included for shell temper sizes (coarse versus fine), paralleling established definitions for the types Mississippi Plain and Bell Plain (Phillips 1970). Shell size classes were identified judgmentally under low power (2–10x) microscopy. Additionally, many sherds contained soft, orange, and hematitic particles that were obviously not grog and appeared integral to the natural clay matrix (Tubman 2008). Regardless, their inclusion in our classification seems warranted on the basis of clay choice. It is apparent that the collection is relatively diverse in terms of its tempers (nine categories of single temper types, and five categories of multiple temper types), even if the hematite-rich clay subdivisions are collapsed and one looks only at major temper types and combinations (reducing it to six single and three multiple temper types). The majority of the sherds possess coarse shell temper, followed in frequency by those with fine shell and those with coarse shell with hematite nodules. Other temper types each constitute less than 5.0 percent of the collection. There are only twenty-three sherds (4.2 percent) that show evidence of multiple tempers, with bone seemingly used most frequently in combination with others. Untempered sherds with possible parallels to Hunter and colleagues’ (1997:249) dense and uniform “Chickachae paste”—or with as yet undocumented local plantation wares—make up a total of 5.4 percent of the collection (n=26), split evenly between hematitic and non-hematitic categories. We also looked for patterns between temper types and vessel sizes. Few of the ware categories or firing atmospheres are strongly associated with a particular category of vessel wall thickness, as was suggested by

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Figure 7.5. Mean sherd thickness (dot) and 95 percent confidence intervals (whisker bars) of select temper types. Figure by authors.

the continuous distribution data discussed above. Fine shell-tempered sherds, however, are an exception. Ignoring the hematite distinction, as a whole fine shell-tempered sherds exhibit significantly thinner cross sections than sherds tempered with sand, tempered with coarse shell, or lacking temper (Figure 7.5). In terms of New World ceramic traditions, this is no surprise, as it reflects the common fine-versus-coarse ware dichotomy archaeologists have often used to characterize Native American collections, with fine wares tending to be most closely associated with more elaborate decorative treatments and burnishing. There is a great deal of intra- and intervessel variability inherent in open firing techniques like those probably used for vessels found at this plantation; however, it is telling that at least one of three firing environments was associated with 86 percent of the sherds in the assemblage: Code 1 (wholly oxidized), 4 (wholly reduced), or 7 (reduced core, oxidized surfaces). Interestingly, untempered sherds tend not to be associated with reduced firing atmospheres (Code 4, only one of twenty-six instances), which may reflect a manufacturing choice given the frequency with which sherds overall are associated with this atmosphere. Conversely, bone-tempered vessels are strongly associated with a total reduction firing atmosphere— eleven of sixteen sherds—and are also disproportionately associated with

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decoration (one-quarter of the specimens). They tend not to be associated with oxidized firing atmospheres (Code 1, only one of sixteen sherds). Combining these various observations, it is apparent that this single ca. 1790–1810 midden embodies a great deal of variability in pottery manufacturing methods, with untempered, bone, and shell-temper choices possibly representing three different traditions, each with connections to multiple historically documented groups, Native American and/or African. Taken together, it implies in a microcosm the same sort of commercial and material fluidity visible in ethnoarchaeological studies of multiple abutting communities (e.g., Hodder 1982), and may exemplify materially the creolization process.

Conclusion Colonoware, as outlined above, should not be treated as a monolithic artifact class, whether along the East Coast or in Louisiana. Potential makers of the pottery that found its way into the Coincoin main house midden at a minimum include: Coincoin and her children, those enslaved by Coincoin, the enslaved—African and Native American—at surrounding plantations, vendors—African and Native American—in the Natchitoches market, and opportunistic vendors selling directly to plantation inhabitants. Observations in 1806 about Native American women vending pots in Natchitoches (Sibley 1832) and in 1813 about Indians looking for work at plantations around Natchitoches (Usner 1998:106) provide strong local historic illustrations of two of these possibilities. As one might expect, our small study of 479 sherds has shown that colonoware is highly diverse as an artifact class even in a tight (ca. 1790–1810) temporal context on a plantation where all the occupants are identified. Some 45.2 percent of the decorated colonoware has strong Native American connections in terms of the types Natchitoches Engraved and Chickachae Combed. It is worth noting, however, that this connection hides even further diversity in pottery traditions, as these two types are associated with historically documented occupations by Adaes, Apalachee, several Caddoan, Choctaw, Coushatta, and Natchez peoples. Red and black slipped sherds, while identified in the Native American ceramic typology as named types such as Zimmerman Black and Chickachae Red, also have long parallel traditions among West African potters. This geographic overlap in decorative techniques begs the question of what evidence we

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might accept for an unequivocally African contribution to the creolized phenomenon of colonoware, outside of more sensational (and sometimes controversial) elements, such as cosmogram symbols (e.g., Ferguson 1999). African potters would have access to the same clays that Native Americans would have used, and their decorative/surface treatment repertoires (incisions, red slip, black burnish, and so forth) bear notable similarities. Distinctions would be even less evident among the plainwares. Only elements such as roulettes and potters’ stamps—hardly universal in eighteenth-century African coastal communities—might set them apart (see Haour et al. 2010; Hauser and DeCorse 2003). Nevertheless, there are meaningful patterns evident in this modestly sized assemblage from the Coincoin midden. Bowls are most common and all vessels were relatively thin, suggesting that the assemblage represents mostly serving wares. Coarse shell-tempered, highly oxidized, and orange-hued vessels are most common (43 percent of the total sherds; n=204). Fine shell vessels are interpreted as a distinct secondary group because of their thinner walls; they comprise some 13 percent of the assemblage. While fewer in number, untempered and bone-mixed-tempered groups are significant in that they reflect different manufacturing choices. As such, we believe they represent manufacturing styles of pottery distinct from the fine/coarse shell-tempered group. While the slipped vessels, including the untempered vessels, can be speculatively viewed as African contributions to creolized assemblages, the majority of the pottery analyzed fits well within the range of late eighteenth-century Native American pottery traditions in northeastern Louisiana. Arguably, much of the range of data presented here—fourteen temper variations scattered across eight firing environments and coupled with typological notes and thickness measures—could merely be noise. “Smoking guns” of demonstrably imported technology or art forms are rare in diaspora contexts, especially those one or more generations removed from the Old World, requiring nuanced approaches to analyzing material culture. It is within this apparent noise, which may represent a diversity of pot-making communities, that subtle signals must be sought. This study of the Coincoin material represents an initial, proposed methodology for coping with and deriving meaning from the “notable intraregional variability” and contextualized localized processes that Anthony (2002) suggests archaeologists have overlooked for so many years. By focusing on fine manufacturing details in the fashion we have done

Plantation Pottery Traditions of Northwest Louisiana · 177

here, we can target similar studies at neighboring plantations within Natchitoches Parish to see where and in what matter the “noise to signal ratio” changes. Will we find at French- or Spanish-owned plantations the same temper, firing, decorative, and functional patterns that we did at Coincoin’s? Will those patterns shift subtly because of proximity to other plantations, proximity to Native American communities, or access to markets or principal waterways? If we were to look at the plantation middens of later generations, would we see cross-generational nuances that are the hallmarks of the creolization and ethnogenesis processes? Certainly a unique aspect of such Louisianan assemblages is the cultural diversity of possible local pot makers and the greater agency of local consumers to acquire their wares. The Coincoin assemblage contains a far greater proportion of colonowares (40.2 percent) than were enumerated at three near-contemporary, French-owned Cane River plantations excavated by other researchers (6–21 percent) (Morgan and MacDonald 2011). The relatively low range of numbers from these French-owned sites is comparable to the proportion of colonoware recovered from Anglo “planter” and “freedman” contexts at contemporary East Coast plantations (Singleton 1988). The greater quantity of colonowares from the Coincoin site, while hardly equal in percentage to those from eighteenth-century East Coast quarters areas (ca. 56–89 percent [Singleton 1988]), holds an unusual intermediate position. This may indicate a culinary requirement by the Coincoin household for certain earthenware vessels (whether for cooking or serving), or at the very least a greater willingness to use them. The present study does not presume to answer the question of who made each of the varieties of colonoware recovered. However, it does set out a likely range of makers and hopefully lays the groundwork by which this question can be usefully framed in future, regionally based research.

Acknowledgments This research was funded by grants from the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. We wish to acknowledge the efforts of all of those who worked with us in the 2001–2007 excavations, but most particularly Fiona Handley.

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Notes 1. The official site name and number on record with the Louisiana State Historic Preservation Office is Whittington (16NA241). 2. Here we use “colonowares” strictly to mean low-fired coarse earthenwares of local manufacture. Vessel forms may or may not mimic European ones, and the ethnic identities of the makers are uncertain—likely Native American, African, or both. We invoke it as a descriptor specifically in an effort to avoid assumptions about what constitutes supposed Native American and African elements in such wares. Implicit in our use of the term is the assumption that it describes a potentially diverse, non-unitary phenomenon, even on the single site level. 3. In 1973, an inquiry by Gary Mills to the Africanist historian Jan Vansina led to Vansina suggesting that the given name of Coincoin might equate to the Ewe second-daughter name of Ko Kwẽ. Not only is this a phonetically awkward match, a comparison of the African given names of Coincoin’s four siblings as published by Elizabeth Mills (2012) shows no matches in any Ewe dialect. Instead, all five sibling African names find probable matches in Bakongo, including for Coincoin herself “Kwākwana” and “Kwànkwá” (Roger Blench, personal communication). A detailed study of this evidence will form the focus of a future publication. 4. Although portions of the 67-acre plantation tract were to be settled and farmed over the some two centuries after Coincoin’s tenure, it appears that neither Pierre nor anyone else continued to use the vicinity of the main house. Whitewares, for instance, make up only 3.1 percent (n=106) of the total collection, and it is reasonable to assume that at least a portion of this pottery class derives from the adjacent standing structure, which was occupied in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 5. Geophysical surveys were conducted in 2006 and 2007, courtesy of a training partnership with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, for whom one of the authors (Morgan) worked during the research program. In all, the workshops yielded ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data from a 4,800 m2 area; fluxgate gradiometer data from a 3,587 m2 area; electrical conductivity/ resistivity data from a 2,814 m2 area; and aerial thermal imagery and photography of the residential core plus most of the plantation. 6. A total of twenty-four sherds larger than 1.28 cm (0.5 in) were further eliminated from analysis, as we were unable to confidently identify some attribute critical to our study (for example, reduction atmosphere for sherds missing an exterior surface).

References Cited Anthony, Ronald W. 2002 Tangible Interaction: Evidence from Stobo Plantation. In Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies, edited by J. W. Joseph and M. Zierden, 45–64. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

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Apter, Andrew 2002 On African Origins: Creolization and Connaissance in Haitian Vodou. American Ethnologist 29(2):233–260. Avery, George 1995 More Friend Than Foe: Eighteenth Century Spanish, French, and Caddoan Interaction at Los Adaes, a Capital of Texas Located in Northwestern Louisiana. Louisiana Archaeology 22:163–193. Berlin, Ira 1974 Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New Press, New York. Blitz, John Howard 1985 An Archaeological Study of the Mississippi Choctaw Indians. Mississippi Department of Archives and History Archaeological Report No. 16. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. Brain, Jeffrey P. 1988 Tunica Archaeology. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 78. Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Burton, H. Sophie, and F. Todd Smith 2008 Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier. Texas A&M University Press, College Station. Byrd, Kathleen M. 2008 Colonial Natchitoches: Outpost of Empires. Xlibris, Bloomington, Ind. Collins, Henry B. 1927 Potsherds from Choctaw Village Sites in Mississippi. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 17:10. Dawdy, Shannon Lee 2000 Understanding Cultural Change through the Vernacular: Creolization in Louisiana. Historical Archaeology 34(3):107–123. Deetz, James 1999 Archaeology at Flowerdew Hundred. In “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, edited by T. A. Singleton, 39–46. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. Edwards, Jay D., and Tom Wells 1993 Historic Louisiana Nails: Aids to the Dating of Old Buildings. Fred B. Kniffen Cultural Resources Laboratory Monograph Series No. 2. Geoscience Publication, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Ferguson, Leland 1980 Looking for the “Afro-” in Colono-Indian Pottery. In Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America, edited by R. L. Schuyler, 14–28. Baywood, Farmingdale, N.Y. 1992 Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. 1999 “The Cross Is a Magic Sign”: Marks on Eighteenth-Century Bowls from

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South Carolina. In “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of AfricanAmerican Life, edited by T. A. Singleton, 116–131. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. Galloway, Patricia K. 1995 Choctaw Genesis 1500–1700. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Gregory, Hiram F., and George Avery 2006 Using American Indian Pottery to Identify Historic Period Sites in Northwest Louisiana. Paper presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Louisiana Archaeological Society. Monroe, La. Gregory, H. F., George Avery, Aubra L. Lee, and Jay C. Blaine 2004 Presidio Los Adaes: Spanish, French, and Caddoan Interaction on the Northern Frontier. Historical Archaeology 38(3):65–77. Haag, William G. 1953 Choctaw Archaeology. Southeastern Archaeological Conference Newsletter 3(3):25–28. Handley, Fiona J. L., David W. Morgan, and Kevin C. MacDonald 2006 Things and Words—Bringing Together the Material and Historical Records of the Isle Brevelle, Cane River, Natchitoches, Louisiana. Paper presented at the 2006 Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (CHAT) Conference. Bristol, U.K. Haour, Anne, Katie Manning, Noemie Arazi, Olivier Gosselain, Sokhna Guèye, Daouda Keita, A. Livingstone Smith, Kevin C. MacDonald, Anne Mayor, Susan McIntosh, and Robert Vernet, eds. 2010 African Pottery Roulettes Past and Present: Techniques, Identification and Distribution. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Hauser, Mark W., and Christopher R. DeCorse 2003 Low-Fired Earthenwares in the African Diaspora: Problems and Prospects. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7(1):67–98. Haviser, Jay B., and Kevin C. MacDonald 2006 Introduction: An African Re-Genesis. In African Re-Genesis: Confronting Social Issues in the Diaspora, edited by J. B. Haviser and K. C. MacDonald, 1–6. UCL Press, London. Hodder, Ian 1982 Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, Ivor Noël 1962 An Indian Ware of the Colonial Period. Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia 17(1):2–12. Hunter, Donald G. 1985 The Apalachee on Red River, 1763–1834: An Ethnohistory and Summary of Archaeological Testing at the Zimmerman Hill Site, Rapides Parish, Louisiana. Louisiana Archaeology 12:7–127. 1994a The Biloxi on Bayou Boeuf: An Ethnohistory and Analysis of Surface Col-

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lections from the Biloxi Village Site (16-Ra-60), Rapides Parish, Louisiana. Mississippi Archaeology 29(2):18–43. 1994b Their Final Years: The Apalachee and Other Immigrant Tribes on the Red River, 1763–1834. Florida Anthropologist 47(1):3–46. Hunter, Donald G., Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., and Cary L. Coxe 1997 Archaeology of the David Wilson Homeplace: Data Recovery at the Huffman Creek Site (16RA433), Rapides Parish, Louisiana. Coastal Environments, Inc. Contract No. DACW38-89-D-0038. Report submitted to the Vicksburg District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Vicksburg, Miss. Jolivétte, Andrew J. 2007 Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity. Lexington Books, Lanham, Md. Joseph, J. W., and Martha Zierden 2002 Cultural Diversity in the Southern Colonies. In Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies, edited by J. W. Joseph and M. Zierden, 1–12. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Kniffen, Fred B., Hiram F. Gregory, and George A. Stokes 1987 The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana: From 1542 to the Present. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2000 The Intersections of Colonial Policy and Colonial Practice: Creolization on the Eighteenth-Century Louisiana/Texas Frontier. Historical Archaeology 34(3):85–98. MacDonald, Kevin C., and David W. Morgan 2012 African Earthen Structures in Colonial Louisiana: Architecture from the Coincoin Plantation (1788–1816). Antiquity 86:161–177. MacDonald, Kevin C., David W. Morgan, and Fiona J. L. Handley 2002/2003 Cane River: The Archaeology of “Free People of Color” in Colonial Louisiana. Archaeology International 6:52–55. 2006 The Cane River African Diaspora Archaeological Project: Prospectus and Initial Results. In African Re-Genesis: Confronting Social Issues in the Diaspora, edited by J. B. Haviser and K. C. MacDonald, 123–144. UCL Press, London. MacDonald, Kevin C., David W. Morgan, Fiona J. L. Handley, Emma Morley, and Aubra Lee 2006 The Archaeology of Local Myths and Heritage Tourism: The Case of Cane River’s Melrose Plantation. In A Future for Archaeology: The Past in the Present, edited by R. Layton, S. Shennan and P. Stone, 127–142. UCL Press, London. Mills, Elizabeth S. 1981 Natchitoches Colonials: Censuses, Military Rolls and Tax Lists, 1722–1803. Adams Press, Chicago.

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2008

Documenting a Slave’s Birth, Parentage, and Origins (Marie Thérèse Coincoin, 1742–1816): A Test of “Oral History.” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 96:245–266. 2012 Demythicizing History: Marie Thérèse Coincoin, Tourism, and the National Historical Landmarks Program. Louisiana History 53(4):402–437. Mills, Gary B. 1977 The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. 2013 The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color, Revised Edition. Revised edition by Elizabeth Shown Mills. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. Morgan, David W., and Kevin C. MacDonald 2011 Colonoware in Western Colonial Louisiana: Makers and Meaning. In The Historical Archaeology of French America: Louisiana and the Caribbean, edited by K. Kelly and M. Hardy, 117–151. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Morgan, David W., Kevin C. MacDonald, and Fiona J. L. Handley 2006 Economics and Authenticity: A Collision of Interpretations in Cane River National Heritage Area, Louisiana. George Wright Forum 23(1):44–61. Mouer, L. Daniel, Mary Ellen N. Hodges, Stephen R. Potter, Susan L. Henry Renaud, Ivor Noël Hume, Dennis J. Pogue, Martha W. McCartney, and Thomas E. Davidson 1999 Colonoware Pottery, Chesapeake Pipes, and “Uncritical Assumptions.” In “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, edited by T. A. Singleton, 83–115. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. Mullins, Paul R. 2008 Excavating America’s Metaphor: Race, Diaspora, and Vindicationist Archaeologies. Historical Archaeology 42(2):104–122. Munasinghe, Viranjini 2006 Theorizing World Culture through the New World: East Indians and Creolization. American Ethnologist 33(4):549–562. Palmié, Stephan 2007 Is There a Model in the Muddle? “Creolization” in African Americanist History and Anthropology. In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by C. Stewart, 178–200. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, Calif. Parsons, Mark L., James E. Bruseth, Jacques Bagur, S. Eileen Goldborer, and Claude McCrocklin 2002 Finding Sha’chahdínnih (Timber Hill): The Last Village of the Kadohadacho in the Caddo Homeland. Archeological Reports Series, No. 3. Texas Historical Commission, Austin. Perttula, Timothy K. 1997 [1992] “The Caddo Nation”: Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives. Revised edition. University of Texas Press, Austin.

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Phillips, Philip 1970 Archaeological Survey in the Lower Yazoo Basin, Mississippi, 1949–1955, Part One. Peabody Museum Papers, Vol. 60. Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Rye, O. S. 1981 Pottery Technology: Principals and Reconstruction. Manuals on Archaeology 4. Taraxacum, Washington, D.C. Sibley, John 1832 Historical Sketches of Several Indian Tribes in Louisiana, South of the Arkansas River, and between the Mississippi and River Grande. American State Papers, Class II, Indian Affairs 1:721–731. 1922 [1807] Indian Notes and Monographs: A Report from Natchitoches in 1807. Edited by A. Abel. Museum of the American Indian, New York. Singleton, Theresa A. 1988 An Archaeological Framework for Slavery and Emancipation. In The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, edited by M. P. Leone and P. B. Potter Jr., 345–370. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Singleton, Theresa A., and Mark D. Bograd 2000 Breaking Typological Barriers: Looking for the Colono in Colonoware. In Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender, edited by J. A. Delle, S. Mrozowski, and R. Paynter, 3–21. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Stewart, Charles 1999 Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture. Diacritics 29(3):40–62. 2007 Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by C. Stewart, 1–25. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, Calif. Stewart, Charles, ed. 2007 Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, Calif. Suhm, Dee Ann, and Edward B. Jelks, eds. 1962 Handbook of Texas Archeology: Type Descriptions. The Texas Archeological Society, Special Publication No. 1, and the Texas Memorial Museum, Bulletin No. 4, Austin. Swanton, John R. 1911 Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 43. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 1946 The Indians of the Southeastern United States. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 137. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.

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Tubman, Julia N. M. 2008 Petrographic Analysis of Cane River Colonoware. Master’s thesis, Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Usner, Daniel H., Jr. 1992 Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 1998 American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Voss, Jerome A., and John H. Blitz 1988 Archaeological Investigations in the Choctaw Homeland. American Antiquity 53(1):125–145. Webb, Clarence H. 1945 A Second Historic Caddo Site at Natchitoches, Louisiana. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological and Paleontological Society 16:52–83. Wells, Carolyn M. 1973 Domestic Architecture of Colonial Natchitoches. Master’s thesis, Northwestern State University of Louisiana. Wheaton, Thomas R. 2002 Colonial African American Plantation Villages. In Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies, edited by J. W. Joseph and M. Zierden, 30–44. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Williams, Stephen, and Jeffrey P. Brain 1983 Excavations at the Lake George Site, Yazoo County, Mississippi, 1958–1960. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 74. Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

8 Identity and Cultural Interaction in French Guiana during the Eighteenth Century The Case of the Storehouse at Habitation Loyola Antoine Loyer Rousselle and Réginald Auger

French Guiana is a former French colony located on the South American continent. During the colonial period, it was part of the circum-Caribbean region and participated in the plantation economic system (Losier 2012). With an equatorial climate, the inland region is covered by tropical rain forest, with mangroves and savannas on the coast (Polderman 2004:19–20). Most of the plantations were located on the island of Cayenne, a peninsula scattered with hills, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, and surrounded by three rivers (Mahury, Cayenne, and du Tour de l’île) (Figure 8.1). The island of Cayenne constituted the main area of European colonization but also marked a cultural and political boundary between two major Native groups, the Karib (Kalina) to the west and the Arawak (Palikur) and their natural allies to the east (Coutet 2010). The first colonizing attempts of French Guiana were made within the context of commercial operations undertaken by trade companies, between 1604 and 1654, without successfully establishing any clear permanent installation (Polderman 2004:31). In 1664, the territory was colonized by the French, after being occupied for ten years by Jews of Dutch origins. In 1674, it was brought under the authority of the state of France, with the establishment of the colony of Cayenne (Le Roux et al. 2009:24–26; Polderman 2004:37). The arrival of European settlers and the massive importation of enslaved Africans changed radically the ethnic landscape of the region and brought in-depth transformation of the social, economic, political, and cultural landscape (Losier and Coutet 2014).

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Figure 8.1. Location of Loyola and the island of Cayenne on the north part of French Guiana. Service regional de l’archéologie de Guyane, 1997, modified and translated by Antoine Loyer Rousselle, 2015.

Unlike the other French Caribbean colonies (Kelly 2009, this volume), French Guiana is characterized by a continuous presence of Native American groups (Polderman 2004). Social interactions between Native people, European colonists, and members of the African diaspora have fostered cultural exchanges between all these groups, and eventually led to the emergence of a unique, creolized society, known today as the Creole culture. While many contributions by Native cultural groups to colonial society are acknowledged (Le Roux 1994), it is unclear to what extent African cultural elements were retained in the Creole society. Until recently, few archaeological studies have addressed questions of slavery and cultural interactions at sites of the French Caribbean. In fact, the development of the archaeology of the African diaspora in the French Caribbean has followed similar trajectories to what has been conducted in the Anglophone world (Kelly 2008:389). Thus, apart from early work by Yannick Le Roux (Le Roux 1986, 1994), plantation archaeology in French Guiana has mainly focused on buildings associated with the production of sugar and the housing of planters, with specific interest in activities related to plantation owners, rather than the lives of the enslaved (Auger and Le Roux 2001). However, in recent years interest in the modern period has

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grown (Delpuech 2001). New research topics have included studies on the lives of the enslaved (Gibson 2007; Kelly 2003, 2009) and colonial cemeteries (Courtaud 2010; Courtaud et al. 1999; Houle-Wierzbicki and Le Roux 2014; Le Roux et al. 2009). In addition, a research project by Losier and Coutet (2014) on ceramic assemblages of colonowares from French Guiana examines questions of cultural interaction and creolization during the early colonial period. In this chapter, we seek to address the social dynamics surrounding the relations between Europeans, members of the African diaspora, and Native Americans, in the context of an eighteenth-century Guyanese plantation. As one of the major plantations of its time in the French Colonies, the habitation Loyola (Figure 8.2) constitutes an appropriate archaeological site for studying past cultural interactions. Loyola was occupied by Jesuit missionaries between 1668 and 1763, and it mainly produced sugar,

Figure 8.2. Eighteenth-century view of the habitation Loyola; the storehouse is the two-story building on the right, next to the kitchen/hospital. From the Carte du Gouvernement de l’île et terre ferme et colonie de Cayenne, by Gérard Hébert, 1730, SHAT, Vincennes, 7F62.

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indigo, coffee, cocoa, and cotton. Profits from the sales were used to fund evangelical work among First Nations in South America. To produce these commodities, Jesuits used a large workforce made up essentially of enslaved Africans (Le Roux et al. 2009:52). The Loyola plantation comprised many locales (residential, religious, artisanal, and agricultural), located in what is now known as the Commune of Rémire-Montjoly, on the island of Cayenne. Most of the buildings have been surveyed or tested, with the exception of the slave quarters (Bain et al. 2011; Le Roux et al. 2009). Our chapter focuses specifically on the remains of the storehouse, built adjacent to the residential sector of Loyola. Our focus is to deal with cultural interactions and past colonial identities within the material culture retrieved from this building. To meet our objectives, we propose a theoretical review of the main approaches most often used to study cultural interactions on plantation sites. We also examine specific social issues, such as power and labor relations, and reciprocal attitudes between Jesuit missionaries, Native people, and Africans in the colony under the ancien régime.

Identity and Cultural Interaction on Plantation Sites The colonization of the Americas had a major impact on the socioeconomic and political structures in place before the fifteenth century (Deetz 1996; Orser 1996). Interactions between cultural groups led to the exchange of material goods, the adaptation of new food and architectural practices, changes in methods and techniques of production, and transfer of cultural traits (Jordan 2009; Lightfoot 1995; Silliman 2005). Hybridized or creolized and diasporic identities originated from these interactions within new social and environmental contexts and the structure of power of colonialism (Chambers 2001; Farnsworth 2001; Gosden 2004:5; Loftfield 2001:207). Plantation sites, as microcosms of the slavery system, witness to the nature of cultural contacts between Native American, African, and European populations, and their contributions to the establishment of the modern world (Singleton 1998:173). The first archaeological studies on identities and cultural interactions at plantation sites (Adams and Boling 1989; Otto 1975; Wheaton and Garrow 1985) have used the model of acculturation introduced by Herskovits (1958). This concept centers on ethnic markers and the retention of

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cultural traits in the material and cultural practices of the enslaved. The search for “Africanisms” has led to numerous research on material culture (see Singleton 1998:174). The same model has also been applied to study the persistence of First Nations’ cultural traits by the search of “Indigenisms” as cultural markers (see Jordan 2009; Orser 1996:60–66). However, the borrowing of such an acculturation model to explain cultural change has been highly criticized, mainly because it does not allow exploration of the actions or material and ideological contributions of African culture and indigenous people to their social environment (Silliman 2005:64–65; Singleton 1998:75–77). Studies based on the acculturation/assimilation model have assumed that African slaves and Native Americans have passively endured the dominance of European culture (Gosden 2001:242; Lightfoot 1995:206; Mullins and Paynter 2000:74). The concepts of creolization or hybridized identities are used instead to address questions of multicultural interactions, creativity, and change following the establishment of the colonial structure in the Americas, as well as to understand the multiple ways by which a nondominant group has appropriated and reinterpreted the material world of the dominant culture (Gundaker 2000; Kelly 2008; Mullins and Paynter 2000; Singleton 1998; Singleton and de Souza 2009). Unlike the concept of acculturation/ assimilation, the creolization process did not operate in a single direction. European colonists also underwent cultural changes resulting from their interactions with other groups and adaptation to new physical and social environments (see Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999:284). Despite its growing application in historical archaeology, creolization is not a uniform concept that can be generalized throughout the whole colonial sphere, but a particular process that happened at multiple levels of space and time (Mullins and Paynter 2000:74; Trouillot 2002:189). Changes resulting from cultural interactions took place on time scales ranging from short periods of contact to sustained long-term interactions (Silliman 2005:58, 2012). Similarly, historical processes and other factors affecting the material aspect of plantations may have happened throughout the Americas and West Indies or been limited to single regions, communities, or individual estates (Lenik 2009:14). For the enslaved, creolization processes were also affected by differing social circumstances such as ethnic mix prior to transportation (Heath 1999), gender ratios, contact with indigenous people, and the restrictions caused by enslavement (MacDonald et al. 2006:124).

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Thus, cultural interactions must also take into account power relations and social inequalities omnipresent in situations of colonialism and slavery (Gosden 2004:5; Hill 1998; Jordan 2009; Silliman 2005). Cultures involved in the creolizing web endured various forms of material, political, and cultural domination by European culture, and forged their identities by constantly negotiating and resisting colonial powers (Mullins and Paynter 2000:74). Forms of domination and resistance also involved measures of compromise, alliances, and negotiations between the enslaved and their masters (Singleton 1998:179–181). On plantation sites, taking into account these forms of domination and resistance has provided a framework in which aspects of slavery can be interpreted and applied to the interpretation of archaeological data (Singleton 1998). Such an approach needs to be applied with circumspection since an overemphasis on various forms of domination and resistance raises the specter of considering the existence of enslaved people only according to their reactive actions to coercion, “not as authentic subjects in their own right” (Garman 1998:138). The study of cultural interactions and the development of Creole societies can also focus on everyday lives (Lenik 2009:12–13; Mullins and Paynter 2000:74), labor relations (Silliman 2006), and past agents’ experience on colonial shared spaces (Silliman 2010). Past populations of the Americas lived, worked, interacted, and negotiated the larger part of their daily existence in colonial spaces such as working areas, fields, storage buildings, the master’s house, and so forth. Such spaces were fraught with activities and objects of ambiguous cultural identity, comprising multiusage and alternative functions. Unfortunately, testimonies of subordinate groups in these colonial “shared spaces” too often remained unintelligible in favor of the dominant group (Silliman 2010:34). Therefore, we suggest that identities and cultural interactions on plantation sites should be based on day-to-day social dimensions of past agents’ lives, within the specific constraints of colonial powers. Labor sites, shared spaces, and domestic areas should be equally considered as spaces of cultural interactions leading to the transformation and creolization of identities. In French Guiana, creolization processes have developed through enduring cultural interactions and labor relationships between Europeans settlers, members of the African diaspora, and Native American groups. These interactions have been manifested through the

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exchange of technologies, ideas, and material, or as means of resistance and domination.

Early Creolization and Cultural Interaction on Colonial Plantations The colonization period of French Guiana caused intense interactions and permeability among the newly involved cultural groups. It is known to have fostered many cultural exchanges and borrowings from one group to the other (Losier and Coutet 2014). During the seventeenth century, the deficiency in supply from continental Europe left the first settlers isolated in an environment that required numerous adaptations (Losier 2012). That context led colonists to rely almost entirely on local techniques and knowledge from Native people for housing, food supplies, agriculture, and transportation (Hurault 1989:48; Le Roux 1994). Native contributions included insights into local geography, flora and fauna, modes of transportation (canoe), slash-and-burn agriculture, culinary practices (use of manioc and millet) and food preparation such as curing (smoking) of fish and meat, adoption of the hammock, and architecture (palm-roofed buildings) (Hurault et al. 1998:21–22, 42, 100; Le Roux 1994:234, 256, 333, 347, 559; Polderman 2004:209). Similar cultural contributions by Native people can be considered at the margins of French colonies. Nassaney and Martin (this volume) have examined the Fort St. Joseph culinary and hide-processing practices utilizing marrow, grease, and brains from deer, wapiti, and bison. They consider such cultural borrowing and sharing among European traders and their Native trading partners in North America as traces of métissage. In French Guiana, a large number of the cultural interactions between Native Americans and Europeans also happened within the colonial trading system. Native people traded foodstuffs (agricultural products, game meats, and fish), local products (wood, feathers), and handicrafts. In the opposite direction, European goods sought by First Nations included iron objects (axes, nails, knives, and so forth), glass beads, weapons, religious objects (crucifix and religious images) alcohol, ceramics, and glass bottles (Verwimp 2011; Polderman 2004:188–194; Rostain 1994). The trading system was probably an important vector of cultural transmission and exchanges between these two groups.

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Unfortunately, not much has been written about the African/Native relations, and what has been documented comes from Jesuit sources, with their own Eurocentric point of view. Participation by Native people in the organized pursuit of runaway slaves is mentioned in historical documents (Polderman 2004:204). Nonetheless, a certain solidarity from Native peoples toward Africans and their enslaved conditions also existed, as attested in the oral tradition of the Maroon Saramaka society (Price 1994). Direct contact and exchange of knowledge between them in French Guiana are highly probable, despite mutual distrust and competition. A comparable situation can be observed in the Coincoin plantation collection (1788–1816) in Louisiana; Morgan and MacDonald (this volume) have reported an abundance of Native American ceramics in the slave quarters. By and large, plantation life is portrayed as the coexistence of two cultural groups (Europeans, including both planters and indentured workers, and enslaved Africans). Although absent from this colonial space, Native Americans played an important role, as manifested in many material aspects of the plantation world (Le Roux 1994:39–40). Nevertheless, Africans formed the majority of the population on plantations. According to the censuses, they accounted for between 80 and 90 percent of the colonial population in French Guiana (Native Americans excluded), numbering as many as 10,000 at the end of the eighteenth century (Losier 2012:116). In French Guiana, the Creole culture originates from the enslaved African population involved in the plantation system and free black people (Mam-Lam-Fouck 2002). However, the lack of data on the geographic origin of the enslaved Africans makes it difficult to document their African heritage (Jolivet 1982; Le Roux 1994). Moreover, the Creole society, as a structured group, only emerged during the postslavery period, after having endured the consequences of colonialism for many generations. Thus, looking at the social context of the slavery system can help to gain a better comprehension of the lives of the enslaved and their contributions to Guyanese society.

Jesuits, First Nations, and Africans: A Complex Relationship Among the most successful planters in French Guiana during the eighteenth century were the Jesuit missionaries. Members of the Society of

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Jesus arrived in Cayenne in 1665, with the objective of establishing evangelical missions among the First Nations of South America. The Jesuits were never very numerous in the colony (they numbered anywhere between eight to fifteen missionaries at a time), but rapidly gained respect and goodwill among the small planters; they rose to an influential position in colonial society. At their peak, the Jesuits owned more than 1,500 slaves for all their Guyanese plantations, with more than 400 at Loyola, making this plantation one of the biggest in all Caribbean colonies at the time (Le Roux et al. 2009:115). Their Catholic missions—Karouabo (1706), Kourou (1713), Saint-Paul-d’Oyapock (1727), Ouanary (1738), Sainte-Foy de Camopi (1740), Saint-Paul (1742), and Sinnamary (1748))—covered more than 10,000 km2 in French Guiana (Le Roux et al. 2009:63, 115). The Jesuits maintained unequal relationships with Native people and enslaved Africans. They acted as defenders of First Nations by opposing unfair practices carried out against them by some planters; those affirmative actions brought them prestige among the needy populations (Hurault 1989; Poucet 2012:236). They also did not try to radically change either the family customs or the lifestyles and habitats of Native people; rather, they strove to maintain the production of Native handicraft, and even increased it in order to meet the financial requirements of their mission (Hurault 1989:58). On the other hand, they had a more ambiguous relationship with enslaved Africans. Despite formal opposition to the enslavement of Africans by the Portuguese during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jesuits finally resolved to accept slavery as a mode of production. They justified the enslavement of Africans by the apparent abundance of the latter in Africa (Collomb 2006:97). However, they practiced slavery under the strict condition that slaves were introduced to Christianity. Paradoxically, conversions proved much easier and durable with slaves than with Native people (Poucet 2012:237). Contrary to many French planters from either French Guiana or the Caribbean, Jesuit control over the enslaved was strictly conducted under the Code Noir, a set of rules dating from 1685 and adopted in French Guiana in 1704 (Le Roux 1994; Hardy, this volume; Kelly, this volume). That edict of law came with strict rules surrounding baptism and the exclusive practice of Catholic religion (Le Roux et al. 2009:111–112; Sala-Molins 2002). Direct historical evidence has revealed the crucial role played by

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religion as an efficient form of control. On the plantation, everyday life was punctuated by religious obligations and the ringing of the church bell. Morning and evening prayers opened and concluded the workdays. Breaches of religious offices were considered a form of rebellion and were liable to punishment. Masses on Sundays and religious holidays were even adapted in French rather than Latin, including a sung mass specifically designed for the slaves (Le Roux et al. 2009:111–117; Poucet 2012:240). “Good” Christian behavior by Native people and the enslaved was also rewarded with gifts (beads, rings, rosaries, and so forth) (Collomb 2006:131). The Catholic religion has also contributed to moderate the excesses of slavery. Jesuits forbade abuses of women by the settlers and made sure to uphold the precepts of the Code Noir among the planters, by imposing religious holidays, Sundays, and feast days as “days off ” (almost 140 “days off ”). Slaves used these “days off ” to work for themselves (Le Roux et al. 2009:116). The Jesuits enjoyed a certain prestige (surely mixed with fear) among the slaves, which ensured them control over this large population, as evidenced by the absence of reported rebellions for nearly a century at Loyola. In addition to religious constraints, the Code Noir also included prescribed corporal punishment, rules that the Jesuits also followed (Le Roux et al. 2009). Despite manifesting scientific and intellectual curiosity with regard to the First Nations’ way of life, comparatively, the Jesuits never really showed much interest toward the African culture (Poucet 2012:238). African dances were described as lewd and obscene, and their moral practices, dubious (Collomb 2006:196; Poucet 2012:238–239). As summarized by Poucet (2012:242), there was no real intercultural meeting between Jesuits and African cultures, no anthropological study, no writing of a dictionary or grammar, and no comprehensive study of their languages. But to some extent, Jesuits practiced charity among their slaves and defended them against the ill intentions of abusive settlers. Notwithstanding the Jesuit popularity in the colony, their relative independence from the Crown earned them resentment from large planters and colonial administrators (Le Roux et al. 2009). This, combined with the debts they contracted in Martinique, may have led to their ban from the French Caribbean colonies in 1763 and their expulsion between 1763 and 1768 (Le Roux et al. 2009:79). The Jesuit order was not confined essentially to French Guiana and the Caribbean; members of the Society of

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Jesus also kept a strong missionary presence all over the Americas and many other colonies around the world from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, until 1773. The Society of Jesus was reinstated in 1814 (Bangert 1986). One way of affirming the French presence in the colony was to set up an agricultural community to the west of Cayenne. The event, known as the Kourou expedition, is about the Acadian contingent that arrived following the Jesuits’ expulsion from the colony. It was during the period 1763 to 1765 that the French administration organized a colonizing expedition in which they enlisted into the Kourou expedition nearly 12,000 unprepared colonists to establish a colony in the South American equatorial climate (discussed by Pendery, this volume). This attempt at colonization has been called by commentators of the time “Le désastre de Kourou.” Within a short period, nearly 7,000 settlers died or left, while only 1,800 decided to stay (Mam-Lam-Fouck 1982; Michel 1989:90–91).

Storehouse of the Habitation Loyola The near absence of historical documentation on the way of life, cultural practices, and religious beliefs of the slaves, combined with the lack of interest in those populations by scholars of the colonial period, leaves us with few elements to study them. Faced with the lack of written documents regarding the enslaved, archaeological evidence of plantation life, where most of the cultural interactions between Europeans and their slaves occurred, is particularly interesting. The archaeological study of shared spaces and labor areas of plantation sites allows us to explore some aspects of the daily lives of past colonial laborers. The storehouse of Loyola constitutes one of these areas where Europeans, African slaves, and, to a lesser extent, Native Americans interacted within the sphere of labor relationships. Two archaeological excavations have been conducted on the Loyola storehouse (Loyer Rousselle et al. 2015; Loyer Rousselle et al. 2013; Loyer Rousselle et al. 2012). The storehouse, located in the residential sector of the plantation (Figure 8.3), is the latest building excavated at Loyola. That type of feature has never been examined previously as part of an ongoing study in the context of colonial plantation archaeology in French Guiana. However, based on historical documents, it is assumed that storehouses were mainly used for the storage of foodstuffs, goods, and tools (Le Roux

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Figure 8.3. Sketch map of the residential sector of Loyola. Adapted by Antoine Loyer Rousselle, by permission of Andrée Heroux.

et al. 2009). Thus, the storehouse of Loyola is assumed to have contained a representative sample of all material culture used on the plantation, with the presence of tools produced to meet an array of functional needs. The building, which measures 17.10 by 7.15 m (55 by 23 ft), is located in the residential sector of the habitation Loyola and was occupied from ca. 1725 until 1768 (Figure 8.4). The exterior walls were made with local stones using a clay mortar technique for the first floor, and a presumed timber-framed structure with wattle and daub for the second floor. The ground floor was covered with bricks, which must have been a useful material to meet the storage functions of this warehouse. On the north side of the building, a brick-covered gangway gave access to two openings, allowing for the transfer of goods. Our analysis of cultural interactions is based on a selection of specific artifacts retrieved from the 2011 and 2012 fieldwork on the storehouse and its periphery. The assemblage totals 21,117 fragments for 2,661 objects represented by approximately 130 categories of artifacts. The material culture has been retrieved from two main areas: the inside of the building over the store floor, and a drainage ditch in which settled domestic waste coming from the kitchen located uphill from the store.

Figure 8.4. Aerial view of the storehouse of Loyola, 2012. North is at the top. By permission of Georges Grépin.

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Artifacts recovered from the interior of the store total 1,270. They represent the context of the occupation and taphonomic activities that occurred after the abandonment and collapse of the building. The most redundant categories of artifacts in the store (bricks, tiles, and ceramics made for sugar production) represent more than 64 percent of the assemblage. That context has revealed a large number of elements related to construction and architecture (81.6 percent), mainly tiles, bricks, and building hardware (nails, spikes, hinges, hook, pegs, and a padlock). The assemblage also contained a significant proportion of objects related to storage (2.3 percent), with agricultural and artisanal tools (2.4 percent) such as a chisel for working wood and stone, a wedge, an ax, hoes, a shovel, a hammer, and a rake. The remaining functions identified from the store interior refer to sugar production (6.6 percent), domestic use (3.5 percent), socio-ideo technic (