Commerce, Cloth and Consumers: Results of Lead Seal Analysis from Three French Colonial Sites in North America

Summary

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 into the use of imported textiles by Native Americans, French habitants, and the military, and how their demands influenced suppliers and producers in Europe. Included will be case studies of specific seals as well as the overall patterns in cloth consumption and cloth origin discovered for each site, and how these findings link draw both maritime and interior posts and their inhabitants into the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2018   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

Keywords

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 876