Small Islands Supporting Empires: Farming Landscapes in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, Pivot of Local Food Sovereignty

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Studying farming landscapes in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon opens the opportunity to emphasize how small islands supported empires. For four centuries, the history of this archipelago is linked to the European colonization of America, and trade networks that allowed European empires to blossom, and overseas colonies to be maintained.

As the main factor of economic development in the region, the cod-based economy has, rightly, channeled academic studies, sidelining other aspects of local sustainability. Farming is one of them. Could cod-fishing, only, have permitted a stable settling of habitants-pêcheurs in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon? An answer could be developed by investigating the relationship between farming and fishing, as two complementary links of local sustainability.

Crossing data from archives and fieldwork, we propose, in the frame of landscape archaeology, to explore agricultural patterns, and the involvement of farming in local and global trade, to draw a more accurate profile of local food sovereignty in the longue durée.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow