Feeding the French Frontier: Foodways at Fort St. Frédéric in the Eighteenth-Century Champlain Valley

Author(s): Matthew O'Leary

Year: 2025

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Atlantic Frontier: Foodways and the Materialities of TransAtlantic Interactions." session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

<html>

The mid-18<sup>th</sup> century French Fort St. Frédéric, on Lake Champlain, loomed large in Anglo-American minds (and histories) as the spear of France’s Atlantic empire – pointed directly at a heart of trade in the British Atlantic, Albany and New York City. Yet emic narratives and the archaeological record tell a different story, one centered on agrarian settler-colonialism. Contrasting popular narratives of a “softer” French imperialism focused more on trading with allied Amerindian Nations than settlement, along the Champlain Valley the French Crown attempted to autocratically mimic the successes of the Thirteen Colonies in creating a stable Euro-American population. Study of regional foodways particularly illustrates this; the construction of fortified windmills along the lakeshore and attempts to introduce breeding herds of cattle highlight the degree of the French investment into colonialization of the region. Concurrently, local colonists and soldiers often engaged in illicit strategies to advance their own stations – smuggling furs to Albany to exchange for British trade-goods. Formal analysis of ceramic wares and cutlery recovered from the fort’s moats allows insight for comparative study between traditional French rural cuisine and that which was consumed within the cultural and ecological heterogeneity of the Atlantic frontier.

</html>

Cite this Record

Feeding the French Frontier: Foodways at Fort St. Frédéric in the Eighteenth-Century Champlain Valley. Matthew O'Leary. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 510306)

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Keywords

General
Coastal and Island Archaeology • Historical Archaeology • Slavery • Worldwide

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51846