Consuming the French New World

Summary

All of France’s New World colonies were based on relationships with particular geographies, from eastern New France, to the western Great Lakes, to the Illinois Country, to Lower Louisiana and the Caribbean, according to the particular products and resources wanted by the Crown, which may be thought of as the ultimate "consumer" of French colonial landscapes. Colonists and French descendant communities engaged with these different landscapes for both commercial and family subsistence purposes. Obtaining, producing, and moving such resources as furs, wheat and flour, hams, bear oil, salt, and sugar required a variety of social networks and power relationships among Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. The cultural landscape of house lots, towns, agricultural lots, shipping routes, and resource procurement sites reflect how people perceived and interacted with the land and each other. Food traditions brought from France combined with local food resources in each region to produce foodways that reflected a particular colonial engagement with the landscape. Even with such differences, however, foodways were also similar among French communities, especially when compared to British and Anglo-American foodways in the same locations. This paper draws on zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, ceramic, and archival data to address these topics.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Consuming Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage