Daily Life through Thousands of Artifacts: Revealing Patterns at French Fort St. Pierre (1719–1729) via Multivariate Statistics

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.

As archaeologists revisit old collections, we strive to develop new, efficient ways to analyze complex datasets with thousands of artifacts. My own work attempts to do so through a reanalysis of the collection and architectural features of Fort St. Pierre (1719–1729). Almost wholly excavated in the 1970s, Fort St. Pierre, near present-day Vicksburg, Mississippi, was located between the Illinois Country and newly established New Orleans and Fort Rosalie in Natchez. The use of multivariate statistics updates Stanley South’s methods and allows for comparisons to contemporaneous French and Native settlements along the Mississippi River corridor. Statistical results combined with excavation and documentary evidence demonstrate the materiality of daily life as well as a looting event in the community’s final hours. Altogether this syncretic approach to the violent termination of the fort highlights early eighteenth-century French and Native sociopolitical struggles in the lower Mississippi River region.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37964.0