Genealogical Approaches to Acadian Diaspora Ethnoarchaeology

Summary

The Acadian diaspora began in 1755 and involved the sudden deportation of about 6,500 Acadian men, women and children from their homeland in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada. Of these, about 2,650 eventually found their way to Louisiana. Central to the retention of an Acadian identity was the tracking of family genealogies as members became dispersed across three continents. Today, four  Acadian study centers conbtribute to managing this robust literature. However, our understanding of the diaspora is based on only a small sampling of the data, and English-language synthetic studies are few in number. This paper explores the use of genealogical data combined with archaeology and landscape studies to expand our understanding of the Acadian diaspora as a transnational event that anticipated global group displacements of the 20th and 21st centuries due to military and economic factors.    

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of the French in the New World   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 276