Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Hybrid Objects and Intercultural Assemblages in Colonial Louisiana

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Under the guidance of Dr. Shannon Lee Dawdy, Ms. Lauren Zych will analyze handmade ceramics collected from colonial sites in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. During the eighteenth century these sites were part of the Louisiana colony, which encompassed the Mississippi river and its tributaries from Canada south to the Gulf of Mexico. Claimed for the French crown in 1682, the colony was eventually divided between England and Spain, and subsequently acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The ceramics under investigation are important because, unlike the majority of ceramics from colonial sites, they are coarse and handmade rather than mass-produced. They are also associated with two groups of people - Native Americans and enslaved Africans - whose experiences and perspectives are severely underrepresented, if not completely absent, from historic accounts of the colonial era. Because these ceramics were recovered from colonial contexts, rather than Indian villages or slave cabins, they reveal complex and multi-faceted relationships between Native Americans, Africans, and European colonists that deserve further investigation. Ms. Zych's research will combine archaeological evidence with data from historic and ethnohistoric records in order to explore the nature and extent of intercultural relations during the colonial period. The European colonization of the Americas had dramatic, and often unforeseen, consequences for indigenous tribes, as well as for thousands of African people forcibly enslaved and transported across the Atlantic. The broad strokes of their stories may be familiar - physical and cultural dislocation, enslavement, extreme poverty, starvation, and death - but scholars agree that this singular vision, glosses over considerable variation in the African and Indian experience of colonization. This project will use material culture, primarily in the form of handmade ceramics, to shed new light on group interaction in colonial Louisiana during the eighteenth century. Using a combination of traditional and experimental archaeological techniques, this project will analyze the production, consumption, meaning and use of handmade ceramics in colonial contexts. Descriptive, typological, and comparative analysis will reveal the social, material and political contexts most often associated with handmade ceramics. Advanced forms of chemical analysis, including neutron activation analysis (NAA) and laser ablated-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), will be used to identify the geographic origins of non-local vessels. Combined with insights gleaned from critical use of historic documents, these analyses will reveal the complex nature of the relations between colonists, Native Americans, and African people in a century characterized by radical transformations in both lifeways and political regimes. This research is broadly conceived and designed to hold significance for multiple audiences. It will highlight the social, cultural and historical contributions of peoples whose role in the formation of America is poorly understood and frequently undervalued. To insure that this research makes an impact outside the discipline, the results will be presented to both academic and general audiences through a combination of public lectures, professional presentations, and peer-reviewed publications. The completed dissertation will be available through a subscription-based database, while raw data generated through this research will be available online in an open forum expressly designed for data-sharing.