French or British? Identifying the Eighteenth-Century Ceramics from a Minnesota Fur Trade Post

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper reports on a recent project to reanalyze the European-made ceramics from archaeological site 21MO20, an eighteenth-century fur trade post near present-day Little Falls, Minnesota. The original interpretation of site 21MO20 as a French-era trading post, possibly associated with French trader Joseph Marin, was the result of Doug Birk’s groundbreaking work at one of the few eighteenth-century fur trade post sites identified in Minnesota. The primary objective of this project was to determine if the tin-enameled ceramics recovered from 21MO20 are French faience or British delftware and hence to determine if the site dates to the pre-1763 French colonial era or the post-1763 British colonial era of Minnesota history. In order to determine the cultural origins of the tin-enameled ceramics recovered from site 21MO20, I conducted a comparative analysis of the tin-enameled ceramics recovered from other eighteenth-century sites in Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, including Grand Portage/Fort Charlotte, Fort St. Charles, Sandy Lake, and Fort Michilimackinac.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37845.0