French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and the Caribbean

French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and the Caribbean. KENNETH G. KELLY and MEREDITH D. HARDY (eds.). University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2011. viii, 250 pp., illus., maps, index. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8130-3680-9.The recently published volume French Colonial Archaeology in the Southeast and Caribbean, edited by Kenneth G. Kelly and Meredith D. Hardy, provides a brief introduction to the contributions of French colonists in the specified regions. The purpose of this volume is not to provide a complete and data-filled history of the French efforts in the New World, but to provide a sampling of how the French culture of the colonists influenced the lives and activities of those persons encountered and living in the Americas. This volume purposely omits the well-documented studies of the French-controlled areas of Canada, the Great Lakes, and the upper Mississippi Valley, instead focusing on regions where the French influence is often overshadowed by the later or stronger occupations of the English, Spanish, American, or other European nations. By using a geographical structure instead of the traditional narrative chronological approach, the emphasis of this volume is clearly on illuminating the sometimes forgotten French influence of these regions of the Southeast United States and the Caribbean.In Chapter 2, Ellen Shlasko presents a case study in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the largest and most historically important ports in the Southeast. This contribution suggests that a thorough interpretation of architectural footprints found archaeologically on plantation sites in South Carolina should consider the heavy French influence of the plantation owners instead of just the African influence of the slaves. She demonstrates the cultural and economic importance placed on French ancestry and heritage through the wording on monument stones placed throughout Charleston.From South Carolina, the authors take readers north to the state of Maryland. Here, Sara Rivers-Cofield (Chapter 3) traces the archival signature of a specific slave-owning family of refugees from the revolution in Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century. The available evidence suggests that the French plantation owning Boisneuf family kept stricter control of their slave force and treated them in a more brutal and oppressive manner than did their Maryland neighbors because of both the generally accepted practices of the French slavery system and a tightening of control due to the recent experiences of the family in the dangerous situation they had just escaped. Whatever the cause, Rivers-Cofield suggests the use of landscape and viewshed analysis as a tool for archaeologists searching for evidence of increased control and, by extension, of harsher slavery conditions.Readers then are taken into the very heart of the Deep South, to Mississippi and Alabama, with three case studies of very diverse subject matters. In Chapter 4, Barbara Hester discusses the contradictory nature of economics in frontier communities. During Biloxi's second tenure as the capital of French colonial Louisiana, the government of France created economic restrictions designed to benefit the mother country. The result was a lack of sufficient supplies and unhealthy living conditions that forced the colonists of Biloxi to create their own unsanctioned trade with the other European and Native American peoples within reach. Archaeological evidence of such interaction includes multiethnic burials suggesting intermarriage and a wider range of ceramics recovered archaeologically than those provided by France. Hester's case study is an excellent demonstration of resistance leading to a reconfiguration of the hegemonic order.In Chapter 5, Marie Danforth takes a closer look at the Moran site (22HR511) cemetery used as evidence of inter-ethnic interaction in the previous chapter. The thirty burials considered here show a high variability in mortuary practices with a significant deviation from French colonial traditions which may be explained by either the temporary nature of a Biloxi (as a staging town for new immigrants) or by the general haste required for burial in conditions of increased mortality rates due to malnutrition and disease. …

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