With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Shannon Lee Dawdy will lead a team of graduate students and local volunteers in excavations to take place within New Orleans's central historic complex surrounding St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. The garden site behind the Cathedral has been a flexible green space used by city residents for temporary shelter, gardening, marketing, and recreation over the last 300 years. By examining the material remains of these activities and applying high-resolution laboratory analyses, the study aims to improve our understanding of how African, Native American, and European residents were exchanging ideas about gardening, medicine, food, and domestic technologies. A broader goal is to develop an archaeological understanding of creolization, or the creation of a new culture out of a diverse colonial population.
Excavations in 2008 at the site (called St. Anthony's Garden) exposed remarkably well-preserved deposits associated with two early French period structures, one of which predates the street grid and may represent an early hut established by a pioneer during the land-clearing phase. The site is also characterized by rich deposits of artifacts and identifiable features dating from the early 1700s. The artifactual remains suggest that Native Americans played a much more prominent role in the early founding years than has been previously appreciated. Expanded excavations and detailed artifact analysis will clarify the nature of these deposits.
The study's intellectual merits are both theoretical and substantive. Why and how did creolization take place in early New Orleans such that by the 1740s locals were identified as uniquely 'creole,' rather than French, Indian, or African? Intermarriage was no more common in Louisiana than in other French and Spanish colonies and missionary efforts were not intense. While Louisiana is often held up as an ethnographic example of creole culture, theoretical explanations for why creolization occurs in some settings and not others are lacking. This project seeks to test the hypothesis that creolization arises under conditions that foster the exchange of material knowledge and technique through collaborative labor, which seems to have been a distinctive characteristic of early Louisiana's economic system based on subsistence agriculture, smuggling, and the deer skin trade.
This project is a key component of the city's first comprehensive archaeological research program. It will establish comparative baselines of ceramic, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data for French colonial New Orleans. In addition, this will be the first time that analysis of phytoliths (akin to fossilized plant cells) will be applied to any type of site in the region.
The broader impacts of the project include a significant public outreach effort, consisting of on-site interpretation and tours of this heavily-visited landmark, public lectures, and preparation for a permanent museum exhibit. Results will be disseminated through a web site, technical reports, and scholarly conference presentations and publications. Students from Chicago and New Orleans will receive archaeological training and local volunteers are invited to participate in this community project.
