French (Other Keyword)
1-21 (21 Records)
This paper describes the analysis of an in situ dirt floor from a French Colonial structure in St. Charles, Missouri. The floor is a prepared floor, constructed of homogenous soil brought from off-site and is similar in thickness throughout. The only identified wall of the structure is poteaux sur sole. In and above the floor, the structure also contained a double-firepit hearth. Artifacts types within the floor are varied, but include several chronological markers indicating French...
Breaking Boundaries on the Periphery: The Demise of Fort St. Pierre, 1719-1729, Vicksburg, Mississippi. (2015)
Fort St. Pierre (1719-1729), in present-day Mississippi, was a short-lived fort on the periphery of colonial Louisiane. In December of 1729 its physical boundaries, the dry moat and palisade, were breached and burned as the fort and its soldiers were attacked by Yazoo and Koroa warriors. Using statistical and documentary evidence, along with newly analyzed information from the 1977 excavations, this presentation will discuss first the slow-decline and then immediate demise of the fort. It will...
Buffers, Bridges, and Bastards: French Missourian’s Approaches to living in an Occupied Territory (2018)
After France lost its North American territories in 1763, many Francophone citizens living west of the Mississippi River found themselves suddenly living in Spanish owned lands. They also found themselves staring into the face of an encroaching and overreaching Anglo population to the east. This paper explores a few ways Francophones in Missouri adjusted to the changing political and territorial situation within the region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Starting with the presence of...
Commerce, Cloth and Consumers: Results of Lead Seal Analysis from Three French Colonial Sites in North America (2018)
Lead seals ("bale seals") remain some of the more mysterious artifacts found at colonial period North American sites, but they have an incredible potential to enrich our understanding of eighteenth-century textile consumption. This presentation will showcase results of the analysis of nearly 300 lead seals from three French colonial sites with different locations, purposes, and inhabitants: Fort St. Joseph, Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga), and Fortress Louisbourg. These varied sites provide a window...
The Creole Village: Trans-Mississippi French Culture in the 19th Century (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Shifting Borders: Early-19th Century Archeology in the Trans-Mississippi South" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 1830s, author Washington Irving traveled the Arkansas River, visiting the settlement at Arkansas Post and the new territorial capital of Little Rock. Irving recorded his observations of Arkansas Post in a short essay entitled ‘The Creole Village'. In this work, Irving describes a ‘serene...
Expessing ethnic identity in a French town: study of the Janis-Ziegler Site (23SG272) in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri (2017)
Dr. Elizabeth Scott introduced me to many aspects of understanding ethnicity in the historical and archaeological record through her years of work at the Janis-Ziegler site (23SG272). Despite Ste. Genevieve being founded by the French, the German Ziegler family resided in the town beginning in the early 19th century. In 2006, archaeological investigations went underway on the Janis-Ziegler site, directed by Dr. Elizabeth Scott and Donald Heldman. The purpose of my research was to discover to...
Fort Ouiatenon and the Indian and French Fur Trade on the Wabash River (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Fort Ouiatenon was established by the French in 1717 in response to Indigenous demands for a fur trade post in the Wabash River valley. For over four decades Ouiatenon was the site of interaction between French, Indigenous, and Metis people. Following an attack by Kentucky militia in 1791, most of the...
La Belle: The Archaeology of a Seventeenth-Century Ship of New World Colonization (2016)
La Belle was a ship used by the seventeenth-century French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in his effort to establish a French colony along the northern Gulf of Mexico. Ultimately La Belle wrecked along today’s Texas Gulf Coast in 1686. The wreck was discovered in 1995 and resulted in a multi-year year program of excavation, conservation, interpretation, reporting, and exhibition. This paper will present the results of all these phases of analysis and reporting by summarizing the...
Legacy Archaeology and Cultural Landscapes at Fort Ouiatenon (2016)
As the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the French fort at Ouiatenon approaches, it is clear that narratives about the area remain focused on the fairly brief affiliation of the New French government with this fur trade site on the Wabash River. In contrast, the archaeological and documentary sources that detail daily life on this landscape speak to the overwhelmingly Native population and sense of place that existed prior to its abandonment in 1791. Several years of archaeological...
Old Mobile: The Internal Structure of An Early 18th-Century French Colonial Town (2018)
Twenty-nine years of archaeological investigations at the townsite known as Old Mobile, capital of the French colony of Louisiane from 1702 to 1711, has revealed ten structures in considerable detail, as well as information on the distribution of other structures throughout the town. Recent new overlays of the two extant historical maps of the settlement permit an evaluation of those two cartographic sources, as well as interpretations of the occupants of the excavated structures. The map...
Poteaux-en-Terre, Faience, Ash Pits and Native American Ceramics: An Update on MoDOT’s Archaeology Under the Bridge (2018)
The continuing archaeological investigations by the Missouri Department of Transportation on the Poplar Street Bridge Project in downtown St. Louis, has increased our knowledge of early St Louis’ French inhabitants, the interactions between the French and the local Native Americans, and improved archaeological methods in urban environments. Excavations in 2016 and 2017 on the Berger Site (23SL2402) have encountered a large French colonial period poteaux-en-terre vertical log structure with a...
Poule Au Pot: Animal Remains from French Colonial Sites in the Old Village of St. Louis (2018)
Since 2013, Missouri Department of Transportation archaeologists have investigated grounds under and around the highway ramps leading to the Poplar Street Bridge in downtown St. Louis, an area that was part of the original village of St. Louis that was platted in 1764. Excavations have revealed the remains of several eighteenth-century poteaux-en-terre structures, cellars, and pit features that were associated with six French colonial properties. Zooarchaeological analyses of these parcels...
Seals and Salves in the Pays des Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Iliniwek to Ste Genevieve: Early Commerce along the Mississippi" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Commerce along the waterways of the Illinois Country left many traces in the archaeological record. Some of these traces provide archaeologists with the opportunity to tie goods back to their European origins and to understand the connections between this interior borderland and the larger Atlantic World. Included in...
Searching for the Lewis and Clark Expedition at Ft. Kaskaskia, Illinois (2018)
Lewis and Clark recruited 11 soldiers from the small US Army outpost of Ft. Kaskaskia (1802-1807), Illinois, in 1803 to join their expedition to explore the American west. This event traditionally has been identified as having occurred at a 1750s French fort of the same name. 2017 SIU summer field school investigations within the fort walls successfully located the remains of the French occupation but found no evidence of use by the US Army. Archaeological investigation of a nearby hilltop,...
A Sequence of French Vernacular Architectural Design and Construction Methods in Colonial North America, 1690-1850 (2016)
This study examines published and unpublished historical archaeological research, historical documents research, and datable extant buildings to develop a temporal and geographical sequence of French colonial architectural designs and construction methods, particularly the poteaux-en-terre (posts-in-ground) and poteaux-sur-solle (posts-on-sill) elements in vernacular buildings, from the Western Great Lakes region to Louisiana, dating from 1690 to 1850. Whether European colonists during the...
A Solid Foundation: Investigations of Early French Occupation in Southwestern New Brunswick, Canada. (2023)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During a preliminary survey for a development project along the St. Croix River in Southwestern New Brunswick a historic foundation of unknown significance was identified and registered as an archaeological site. The St. Croix River is the location of Saint Croix Island, which is an International historic site, and known as the location of an early attempt at year-round colonization by...
Threads across the Ocean: Investigating European Cloth in New France through Lead Seal Analysis (2017)
This presentation will seek to highlight the use of lead seals ("bale seals") as documentary artifacts that reveal pertinent information relative to the varieties of cloth and merchant networks once connected with archaeological sites. Used in the 17-18th centuries to mark merchandise, especially cloth, these metal tags are found in Europe and at European colonial sites, where they remain as silent witnesses to the markets and consumers of the past. Their markings and imprints give us a glimpse...
Through a Mirror Darkly:Colonial Forts in Materiality and Memory (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The name “Fort Kaskaskia” has been applied to two adjacent colonial forts in Illinois, one French (11R326) and one American (11R612). Through time the separate identities of the two forts became conflated into one (11R326), whose still visible remains have served as a focal point for American commemorative...
Toward an Archaeology of French Settlement in the Arkansas River Valley: Chasing the Arkansas Post in the Documentary and Archaeological Records. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Comparative Perspectives on European Colonization in the Americas: Papers in Honor of Réginald Auger" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1686, while in an attempt to rendezvous with René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, Henri de Tonti established the "Poste de Arkansea" at the Quapaw village of Osotouy. Garrisoned by a handful of adventurers, the Arkansas Post was the first ‘semi-permanent’ French...
Trenches to Rafters: The Archaeology and Architecture of Francois Valle II's Ste. Genevieve Home (2019)
This is an abstract from the "POSTER Session 3: Material Culture and Site Studies" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This poster details the history of a previously unexamined French Colonial poteaux sur sol structure in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Contrary to local oral histories, archaeological evidence from the Sangamo Archeological Center’s 2017 and 2018 excavations indicate that this building was once much grander than the now-modest structure...
Vanikoro escape: The archaeological potential of the La Perouse expedition survivor craft (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. When the two ships of the French exploratory expedition under La Perouse were wrecked in Vanuatu in 1788, the survivors built another vessel from salvaged components and attempted to sail back to France. They never made it, and the expedition was lost without trace until the shipwrecks were discovered in Vanuatu in 1827. The fate...