Sugar Plantations in the French West Indies

The French West Indian colonial possessions of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Domingue were among the most valuable overseas European colonies due to the production of the tropical commodities of coffee, cocoa, and in particular, sugar. The crops were raised on plantations through the labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and their descendants between the mid 17th century and the mid 19th century. In spite of the importance of this heritage to the history of the French colonial enterprise, and more importantly, the history of the descendant populations, commemoration of this chapter of history has only recently begun. This commemoration includes public monuments, official recognition, and archaeological research. Historical archaeology contributes a perspective that sheds light on otherwise undocumented or poorly-documented aspects of the slavery era, such as the organization of villages, the housing within them, and the ways in which enslaved people saw to their needs for food.

An Introduction to the Archaeology of Francophone Communities in the Americas

This chapter provides a historical and geographical background and situates the volume’s contributions in the context of previous archaeological research into the French in the New World. The chapter discusses the ways in which French settlers made their presence felt on the landscape and on Native groups through a wide range of settlement types, economic and social networks, and successive generations of habitation. The chapter reviews both the well-studied French colonial period and the lesser known post-Conquest period, after the Treaty of Versailles and after the ancien régime fell, during which communities of Francophone peoples (ethnic French, Native American, and African) continued to live in the New World.

Identity and Cultural Interaction in French Guiana during the Eighteenth Century

In colonial times, French Guiana, located on the north coast of South America, was part of the circum-Caribbean region and participated in the triangular trade. Beginning with their arrival in 1665, Jesuit missionaries had control over the religious affairs for the colony and gained a very influential position within the colonial population until their expulsion (1763-1768). They also participated in the plantation system, as a way to finance the establishment of their evangelization work among the Native people of South America. With their most iconic plantation, the Habitation Loyola (ca 1720-1768), the Jesuits were the first producers of sugar, coffee, and cocoa; over a century of their exploitation more than a thousand slaves were scattered over all their possessions. In this chapter we seek to explore the social dynamics and cultural interactions between the Jesuits, the enslaved Africans, and the Native populations within the plantation system. We begin with a brief review of the plantation studies in French Guiana and the Caribbean, then we address the questions of cultural interaction studies and the creolization process. Our analysis is based on specific sets of artifacts retrieved mainly from a trash deposit associated with the kitchen and the Great House.

“They Are Fit to Eat the Divel and Smoak His Mother”

Smoking tobacco pipes was more than simply a leisure practice among labor class French Canadian voyageurs. Rather, smoking played an active role in the struggle over the terms and conditions of the fur trade workplace. White clay pipes were key material symbols of male French Canadian identity and were even celebrated in the voyaguer’s chansons—songs used to keep time as they paddled. Fur trade elites (the bourgeois), however, tended to link smoking with “laziness,” a powerful trope in capitalist discourse. This chapter examines the practice of smoking among the voyageurs and the role of clay pipes in mediating class tensions and reproducing French Canadian identity.

Uncovering the French on St. Croix

This discusses presents and explores a seventeenth century colonial landscape of the island of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. It identifies the potential for the presence of an archaeological record of the French colonial rule of the island, which can be initially identified through the development of a historical geographic information system (GIS) that ties together landscape features, modern geography, satellite and aerial imagery, historical maps and other archival records, and archaeological data. This GIS will assist researchers in understanding the movements and interactions of people across space and through time, changes in land use and development, and comprehending how those they are studying conceptualized and organized their own worlds.

Food and Furs at French Fort St. Joseph

Fort St. Joseph was an important French trading post in the western Great Lakes for nearly a century. Furs and provisions from the region were exchanged for imported goods such as cloth, metal tools, and glass beads, among other objects used in daily life. Zooarchaeological investigations conducted at the site for over a decade have yielded copious amounts of animal bones along with artifacts and features associated with collecting and processing animals for furs and food. An examination of archaeological remains from the site provides insights into animal exploitation patterns and their role in subsistence and exchange.

Landscapes of Forgetting and the Materiality of Enslavement

Forgetfulness can be a violent act. In discussing Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, Walter Schroeder writes that “the French, Spanish, and Americans shied away from using the words esclave, esclavo, and slave except in official documents” (2002:12, n.11). Modern landscapes and historical narratives of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri similarly reflect a semi-purposeful “forgetfulness” on enslaved individuals within the region. This chapter provides a detailed case study of such an instance of “forgetfulness” on an ethnically French house lot in the Middle Mississippi River valley. A comparison between objects found to be associated with class, gender, and ethnicity from both the still-standing Janis house and a no-longer-standing outbuilding just behind the main house provided insight into both the decisions made by the French in the design of the property’s space and the materiality of Francophone slavery in the Illinois Country. This chapter ultimately addresses the materiality of enslavement within ethnically French communities in North America.

Archaeological Dimensions of the Acadian Diaspora

Chapter 2 explores actual and prospective archaeological sites of the Acadians, a culturally distinctive francophone group from the Canadian maritime provinces expelled by the British in 1755 on the eve of the Seven Years War. They were prevented from returning to their Acadian homeland at the war’s conclusion and many relocated to adjacent Canadian provinces. Others were co-opted by the French government to work on colonial labor projects in Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) and to settle in outlying parts of French Guiana. Yet others sought to establish New Acadias in Louisiana and along the Saint John River in Maine and New Brunswick. Such settlements typically straddled different ecological zones allowing Acadians to exploit both wild and cultivated food resources. Acadian cultural patterns of behavior, values, and identity persisted but over time blended with those of neighboring groups. Today, the earliest Acadian diaspora sites are threatened by climate change and coastal development.

Pots Sauvage

This chapter uses archival and archaeological data to identify the broad range of cultural trajectories that may have contributed to the creolization of the colonoware assemblage present at the Whittington site in Louisiana. Between 1788 and 1816 this site was the plantation residence of Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, a formerly enslaved woman of African parentage who found freedom through an extended liaison with a French bourgeois. Analysis focuses on colonowares deposited in a single household midden feature dating ca. 1788-1794, yet even such a narrow time slice produces a prodigious web of possible contributions. The most common colonoware vessels in this midden are bowls, especially with everted, folded rims and rounded lips. Some of the decorated pottery from the assemblage has strong Native American connections, especially in terms of the types Natchitoches Engraved and Chickachae Combed. It is worth noting, however, that some of the red and black slipped techniques and their fabrics have parallels with coeval West and Central African wares. While the slipped vessels, including ‘untempered’ vessels, could be speculatively viewed as African contributions to creolized assemblages, the majority of vessels resemble an array of Native American wares, and it is likely that the Coincoin assemblage had many makers of different ethnicity.

Access to First-Choice Foods and Settlement Failure at French Azilum

Food preferences at the late 18th century refugee site of French Azilum in northern Pennsylvania were complicated by factors of status, national origin, and the desire for familiarity. Those fleeing the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the enslaved individuals accompanying them, were heirs to a tradition of hierarchical access to preferred foods. The consumption of these preferred foods bolstered their claims to status and belonging during a time of extreme, violent transformation of their social world. While documentary sources at Azilum portray a picture of food scarcity, excavations show expenditures of resources for high status, imported food items as well as lower status types of meat. Given the artifacts found, it seems likely that either the aristocratic French and Haitian refugees were preferentially importing only the highest status food items like coffee, chocolate, wine and sugar, or that the excavated areas are reflective of the diets of the enslaved individuals at the site.