This volume, edited and introduced by Professor Emerita Elizabeth Scott, was inspired by the session “Historical Archaeology of French America” from the 2014 meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. It draws broadly on francophone research to challenge the perception that French influence in the New World was limited in both scope and duration, having little lasting influence in the wake of Anglo-American expansion. Together, the contributions demonstrate how various communities adapted to new physical, economic, and political environments with strategies that allowed them to maintain distinct identities—even after the loss of French sovereignty.
Scott's excellent introduction is a brief but thorough survey of the themes that have dominated the field in recent years. In it, she emphasizes traits common to French-speaking communities in the New World, including relatively low French populations, heavy reliance on interior waterways, wartime isolation, and extensive dependence on Native American and African forms of knowledge and labor. She avoids producing a caricature of Frenchness with discussions of the many forms of difference—including class, ethnicity, occupation, and religious affiliation—that shaped individual communities. An impressive synthesis of archaeological data supports this narrative of similarity and difference, providing a solid framework for the rest of the volume.
The remaining contributions are studies from diverse historic and archaeological contexts that add nuance to Scott's themes. The volume includes research on the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, from contexts in North and South America and the Caribbean. The evidence is drawn from a remarkably broad range of sites—temporary rest stops (posés), a fort/trading post, a house lot, an elite refugee community, and several plantations—and the resulting data are quite varied. Several chapters analyze complete assemblages, but the majority consider specific material classes and/or artifact types (e.g., pipes, ceramics, faunal remains).
Nearly half the chapters in the volume are plantation studies, as life among the enslaved “remains one of the least understood aspects of French America” (p. 10). Some investigate aspects of daily life, as in Whitson's analysis of class, gender, and ethnicity on a French house lot in Missouri and Kelly's discussion of sugar plantations in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Others explore relations between plantation residents and native people. Morgan and MacDonald, for example, examine Native American traits in a ceramic assemblage from the plantation of a free, slaveholding woman of color in Louisiana. Rousselle and Auger reveal a complex web of power relations on a large plantation where French Jesuits used African labor to support the conversion of French Guiana's indigenous people.
Other essays engage issues of adaptation, integration, and identity among the ethnic French. Nassaney and Martin's faunal analysis emphasizes integration, revealing how native foods and fur processing techniques were successfully incorporated into French colonial identities in the pays d'en haut. Pendery, on the other hand, forwards adaptation, pointing out that Acadians maintained community identity despite forced migration. Mann addresses identity more explicitly, arguing that aspects of voyageur identity, notably mobility and smoking practices, served as a form of resistance against Anglo-American bourgeois. Finally, Costura's account of foodways at French Azilum demonstrates that elite identities were seriously threatened by the lack of “appropriate” foods in this refugee community in Pennsylvania.
As with many conference-based volumes, the quality, tone, and content of each chapter vary. While most present new data or analyses, others read as pre-field research (Hardy, Pendery) or research summaries (Kelly). Contributions on more familiar areas of French settlement—Old Mobile, New Orleans, Quebec—are notably absent, though the back cover suggests that this is intentional. Multiple essays utilize concepts, i.e., creolization, without definition or critical reflection. Authors were clearly encouraged to engage with each other, but rather than creating a productive dialogue, the internal references are stilted and awkward. A closing discussion and synthesis would have added much needed cohesion to the volume.
Despite these critiques, the volume accomplishes several important tasks. It brings together work from US, UK, and Canadian scholars, who unfortunately attend different conferences and publish in different venues and often in different languages. It summarizes up-to-date knowledge of the field and identifies topics (slave life) and geographic areas (the Caribbean) in need of further study. It teases out important questions about identity in colonial and postcolonial contexts, asking what we might learn from the study of French-speaking communities in the absence of French material culture. More generally, it engages topics of interest to historical archaeologists, such as class, race, gender, and diaspora, and should find a comfortable audience among colonial specialists, francophone scholars, and individuals interested in plantation and identity studies.
