Robert Mazrim presents: Archaeology in the French Colonial Illinois Country

All right, well, I brought a lot of slides tonight. So you'll notice I'm going to bounce through them rather quickly, because I want to give you just an overview of what we've been doing in a very recently, surprisingly recent period. In the last 15 years, and really in the last 10, there's been an enormous amount of new work associated with the French presence, the French colonial presence here in Illinois. When we talk about the French arriving to what became Illinois, we talk about two basic nodes that were their principal focus. The first one, when they first arrived, was in the upper part of the Illinois Valley, centered around Starved Rock, and most importantly, focused on native Illinois villages. And the French presence here, and during that period, roughly 1670 to 1700, technically a colonial one, but really it's just some guys going to work. They're here to do a job. They're opening up trade. They're establishing political boundaries. They're exploring waterways. But it's mostly a small group of men that come here and then go home to Canada again. And we don't really get a colonial presence, which means year-round houses, and French women, and French babies, and cupboards, until the whole lot of them moved rather suddenly down to what we know of as the American bottom at the beginning of the 18th century. So what we're going to talk about tonight is not up here, but down here, and begins around 1700. Basically, we're going to be talking about four principal villages that formed the nucleus of the French colony. And as you can see, they're very close together, mostly very near the mouth of the Kaskaskia, with the exception of Cahokia, which is, of course, closer to St. Louis. So of these communities, let's just begin chronologically. Cahokia begins as a French presence in 1699. And that date is the date of construction of a mission to the Tamaroa, and to a lesser extent, the Cahokia. So again, it's French priests coming to a native village to establish a mission. That's what began the village of Cahokia. And quite quickly, it became a domestic settlement for the French. And quite quickly, the Native Americans were ushered out. At Kaskaskia, just a few years later, the Jesuits, kind of competing with the seminarians that settled Cahokia, also followed a native group, another band of the Illinois, to the mouth of the Kaskaskia River, and established yet another mission. And that mission was a continuation of the one that Marquette had begun at Starved Rock 30 years earlier. Finally, Fort de Chartres, or the village of Chartres, this one's a little different. This doesn't begin as a mission, like the other two villages do. And instead, it probably began with something that was known as the establishment, which was a group of traders who were starting to get old and starting to become a little more sedentary, marrying into the native population, the Michigamia, who lived in that area. And then the French military getting there to kind of find a strategic place, establish a little law and order, and knowing that this floodplain out here was going to be a great place to grow wheat. And so the first Fort de Chartres is built there, and the village of Chartres followed. This then became, essentially, the colonial capital of French Illinois. Not many places to go look at this archeologically anymore, because the French liked to settle right along the river. And the river not only floods, it carves away the banks to the point where we have lost a lot. Places like French Kaskaskia eroded almost over a period of about two years after a catastrophic flood. And it survived late enough that there's photographs of it falling into the river. But it started out as a very well-organized village. And today, there's about 5%, 3% left of that landform that had that village on it. So we're not going to see much archeologically for French Kaskaskia. The village of Chartres is just about as bad. This was the capital of French Illinois. And the limits, it's very poorly understood. The limits of the town are still being researched by Margaret Brown. But roughly here, the stone fort, if you're familiar with, is right here. You can see it on this LiDAR map. And the original village is here. All of this, this way, has been cut and gouged and removed by the river. And then we have a levee here. So this is what we get now, this little bit and a little bit here, what, less than 10% of the village to look at. And yet, we've still done archeology there. And there's still things to do. French Cahokia is in pretty good shape. We've lost about a third of it. The village used to come out to about here. Again, another river meander in the 19th century took out about a third of town, a little less maybe. What threatened Cahokia mostly, and still does, is essentially development of the area around it. In the early 20th century, that was industrial development and the housing that was associated with it. But the core of the little French village of Cahokia is still intact. These streets, one, two, and three, have been there since the 1740s. And they've had the same name ever since. And the social fabric of Cahokia, there's still a little bit of it. Two generations ago, there was considerably more. But there are still French names on some of the mailboxes. And it's also quite an archeological preserve. There's a lot of intact archeology there. And it's also the place that we've done the most digging. So you can see, we have a number of sites here scattered across town that we've done some sort of excavations on. So we've learned a lot. Most of what we know about French domestic life in Cahokia, or in Illinois, comes from Cahokia. Most of the time, the archeology that you read about in the newspaper is salvage-oriented, as you know, based on road work. And we've certainly done that at Cahokia. But the problem with that is that we get to dig within the right-of-way, in the area that's going to be damaged by development. So we get slices of what looks very enticing through here, but we don't get to follow it out. So, but we're still able to conduct research. And in this case, we had a French house on top of a native Illinois occupation, and then an early American house on top of that. It was complicated. Beginning in 2006, though, we conducted about three years of strictly research-based excavations, partially privately funded, in the town of Cahokia, on private property. And we learned an enormous amount about the archeological signature of French houses, beginning around 1740, all the way through about 1800. The first site, what we call Duck House Site, right here behind John Reed's tool shed. This started with an overlay of an 18th-century map onto the modern aerial photographs. I identified the location of a probable house. I knocked on this guy's door. I said, I think there's a French house in your backyard. He says, I know there is. I'm digging up pottery in the herb garden all the time. Come on in. And as a matter of fact, I'm descendant of the family that built the Cahokia Courthouse in the 1740s. He's a perfect guy. And we became friends, and we tore the heck out of his yard for about two years. But I promise, it looks really good now. I check on it now and then, and it's looking good, so. When you dig at Cahokia, you're digging a lot of things. It's a complicated place. We know of it as the French community that it was, but that French community was built on top of and displaced a native village. And so we're gonna see both of that when we dig in most places in downtown Cahokia, and we have to be cognizant of that. And at the Duck House Site, we found just that. We found a French house right where the digital overlay said it would be. And basically, we have a very thick plow zone because we've got a lot of alluvium here from flooding, which protected the old deposits below. But this is wall plaster from a fancy French house that was built on a foundation. And this wall plaster represents its demolition. And then this soil here, this was really yummy soil that was full of garbage that was percolating through the floor, that was being chucked underneath the house while the people were living there in the 1750s and the 1760s. And then underneath that, though, was an old A horizon and a house basin that was probably part of the Illinois village that was there sometime beginning in the late 17th century. And this part of town probably all the way up into the 1720s or so. This house, the Lacoste family, this is what their house would have looked like. It was built on sills rather than post and earth. And this is probably what was in John's backyard, something like this. And underneath that house, as I said, it was a very rich deposit of material that was just dropped right through the floor or they were pitching it under there. So we had domestic debris, we had cooking debris. And it was such that we could actually identify different areas within the house. We could see cooking and sewing in one place and we could see a bunch of people sitting around smoking pipes in another place. The front room and the back room of the house produced distinctly different artifact assemblages. So it was wonderful, it was just this lovely preservation. This is what we ended up doing. This was a research excavation and it had limited funding and it was somebody's backyard. So we didn't bring in the backhoes. We're good with backhoes, we usually use backhoes. This time we had to do it the old fashioned way with test units. We had a great crew and we put in a number of test units and we have all these features here. We even got, John let us put one in the herb garden but the rest of them were in his yard and up next to the patio. And this is the interpretive map of that, of what we found. Here was the dwelling, we found its chimney, we found its cistern. And then when we find these pits in the backyard, we call them storage or processing pits because we don't know what they are. They were probably one or the other. It's something where you either butcher something or it's where you put some squash in for a while during the early winter. And then ultimately garbage laden soil gets put in later. But underneath that was this, which was a pretty well defined, somewhat circular sunken floor of a native house. And nearby also things we would call smudge pits where they're taking corn cobs and lighting them on fire and then letting them smoke and they can smudge hides. They can tan hides that way with the smoke. And so we also then saw the native occupation of the village prior to the arrival of the French, all in somebody's backyard. So then we went next door. And John's house is just right over here. This area was in cultivation and we opened another grid with test units. This was the work of six people in three weeks. This was a heck of a project and we had limited funding and the crew was just spectacular. And again, we were able to define the footprint of a colonial house. But in this case, it wasn't a post on sill house. It was a post on earth house. And we never did get its west wall. It was a big long house and it was old. It was probably built in the early 1740s, but it looks something more like this where vertical logs were placed in trenches directly in the earth, just like on a much bigger scale, like you would a Mississippian house. So for those of you who haven't seen French colonial archeology, basically extant buildings, they're log buildings, but they're vertical log. When the Americans came, they stacked their logs horizontally. But French built these vertical log structures as they had in Northern France and as they had in Canada after that. Most of them were in the ground. Because they're in the ground, they rot, they fall down. The ones on the sills tend to last longer and they were more expensive to build. Here's an example of one of those builder's trenches with actually the post hole still visible. And we could even see the builder's trench. Everything was very well preserved, again, because we had a nice cap of alluvium on top. We found a footing to a very large limestone fireplace, probably looked something like this, which was built a little bit later in the 18th century in the village of St. Genevieve in Missouri. It had a pit cellar. It had an earthen pit. It wasn't lined with stone. It might have been lined with wood. Underneath the kitchen, we excavated a portion of that. And the other thing, too, is that because this isn't salvage related and it's not road work, we don't dig it all up. We dig up enough to just get a sense of what's there and then we try to preserve the rest of it in place. So in any one of these sites, we dug less than 25% of what is deposited there. At the Gamon site, then, we have a very large house. These are the wall trenches here. The builders would build very wide trenches in some places, just like ditches, almost, and then they would lay out a string, probably, and line their logs up in a row with a large cooking fireplace and a pretty large cellar there under the house. But as you can see, there's still a lot left at the site. The material culture, the artifacts that we got at Cahokia are the best, the largest, most robust, diverse assemblages of French goods that we have from Illinois. And that's all been dug since 2005. Archeologists always start with the ceramics, right? So, of course, on a French site, you expect French ceramics. And during the 18th century, that meant French faience. It's tin-glazed ware. In France, when you made a tin-glazed plate, it was called faience. If you made it in Italy, it was called majolica. If the Dutch made it, it was delft. So, it's the same stuff. And they start making it in the late 1500s. And the whole purpose of this is to imitate French porcelain. Those designs, I'm sorry, Chinese porcelain. So these designs actually refer to very old Chinese patterns. And this, then, was their best attempt to kind of mimic that very refined white table setting, which was a revolution in consumerism in the 16th and 17th century. You were coming out of an era where there were communal trenchers and eating out of big soup pots and drinking out of big stoneware jugs made by the Germans. This was having your own individual place setting and then being able to take that plate and put it up on a cabinet and decorate your house with. That starts in the 17th century. We haven't been doing that very long in history. Most of what we find are these plates, but in some cases, we do get hollowwares like pitchers and terrines. And we also get non-French tin-glazed wares. So, what this illustrates, basically, is that this is a very international economy. And it doesn't matter to people who are living in these houses what flag is flying overhead. Nor does that matter to merchants. Where they can get the cheapest goods and the most popular goods is where they're going to get them. And this stuff kind of gets all mixed up. So, the act of putting a French faience plate on your cupboard was not a patriotic act. It was pretty. And if you could get one made in Amsterdam or even in Mexico City, that was fine, too. Coarse earthenwares, the crockery for making food in the kitchen. These are all French, made in just a series of little towns on the coast of Western France in an old area where they had been making pottery like this since 13th century and shipping it out as part of the wine trade. When you visit towns like this, some small roads are paved with this broken pottery because there were so many kilns making so much of this stuff. Being French sites, we expect to find wine bottles. We don't. This is the best bottle out of two fragments that I've seen from French domestic context. Most of the wine that's arriving at these houses is arriving in casks, I think. And we actually find more whiskey bottles or wine bottles and whiskey bottles and that kind of thing on native sites. I think these are being traded to the Native Americans more often than they're being consumed by the French settlers themselves. And then, you know, little bits of food bottles, medicine bottles, there's not much. There's not a whole lot of glass during this time period. Cookware is the same way. We get these tripodal, you know, cooking cauldrons and this little brass lid. But this stuff obviously was durable, didn't break often. When it did, it broke in maybe three pieces rather than 50, so the odds of us finding one are a little bit less than a faience plate. And then all this, the little bits and pieces of daily life. You know, none of this is earth shattering. We know these people sewed. We know they used scissors. It's not surprising they had thimbles. But nonetheless, these things kind of just flesh out life in these houses. This was remarkable, this is a chatelaine. It's a pair of scissors still attached to the little brass belt that was worn around the waist by a female at the house. You had this and you had all these other little tools and decorations on this belt. And for some reason, this thing ended up in the backyard. Pocket knives, clasp knives. At Cahokia, you know, you put in a hole, you're gonna find one of these. These are the currency of the fur trade. They were just given out as party favors practically. They're everywhere, they're thick. When you go to the farming villages like Prairie de Rocher, you don't find nearly as many. So this really probably has to do more with Cahokia's history with the fur trade rather than with agriculture. Gun parts, we find them. We don't find a lot of them. These are well cared for, they're curated for generations. But we do get a sense of the kinds of guns they had. In most cases, they're rather inexpensive French fuses that were old military issue. But there are always exceptions. And then of course, gun flints, the little thing that's used to create the spark in a flintlock musket or a rifle. And these things, again, if we didn't find a handful of these in a day digging in John's yard, there was something wrong. They just litter the ground at places that are heavily involved in trade and in hunting. Clothing is really a tragedy to archeologists because so much of your identity and your heritage and how you picture yourself is expressed how you dress. And the only thing we see in the ground are buttons or buckles generally. So we can say very little about the nature of dress. And because of the nature of fashions during the 18th century, most of what we can say is actually about men's clothing because women's clothing didn't use many metal fasteners during that period. So most of what we look at are actually vest buttons, coat buttons, sleeve links from men's garments. And then just a little bits, jewelry. You know how they always ask archeology if you dug up any gold. We finally dug up a piece of gold right there. It was a gold sleeve link. And it's magnified there a little bit. But little glass jewels that were set in rings or in necklaces. This is a trade ring here. And then this little bit here, these are trade silver items made probably in Canada, made primarily for the native trade, but also used by the French as well. In your hair or on ribbons in your outfits. We don't find nearly the trade silver that one would expect in such a vivid trade economy. If you go across the border to Wisconsin, you're gonna find a lot more of this. We don't find it here. And it's interesting. Toys, mouth harps, you know, used to call them juice harps. These have been around forever. And then these whizzers, which are basically pieces of lead that are hammered flat. And then two holes put in there and you run a loop string through there and you start doing this and they make a whizzing sound. Found a lot of those in Cahokia. We find them on native sites and we find them on French sites. Kids are kids, you know, they have fun with this stuff. Smoking pipes too, lots of smoking pipes. I spent the first half of my career digging American frontier sites and we found a few smoking pipes now and then. At French sites, we find them by the bucket full. The French and their native partners smoked a lot of tobacco and it was more than a food stuff. It was a practice and it could be a ceremony even. And it's illustrated by lots of pipes that are made mostly in England. But also stone pipes. These are stone, the keels here. Oh no, here's keels and here's a bowl. Here's a bowl of what we call a Micmac pipe. It doesn't have a real deep history. It doesn't seem to be a shape that goes into prehistory. And so far in the Midwest, I've not found any of them that predate 1700. They seem to be primarily an 18th century phenomena. And because they're stone, we put them in the native pile when we're sorting things. I said in the tradition of Native American pipes, there's plenty of evidence now that the French are making these too. It's silly to call them an Indian thing or a French thing. They're a fur trade thing. These are expressions of a society, not of an ethnicity. And that's what makes them really cool. And that's the thing too, in a place like Cahokia, it's so tempting to start parsing out what we consider the things that are associated with the Native Americans and with the French. That's very dangerous. In a place where there's so much intermarriage and so much just working relationships and friendships, what we're really looking at as, by the time Cahokia becomes a town that we can see archeologically, are a couple of generations of hybrid culture. And there's a word for it. It's called Metis or Creole, but Metis is more appropriate with the native element. And that's what places like Cahokia are. And that's why if we get a big enough sample from Illinois, I think we're gonna see that these locales look different as you go in different places, because the regional expression of that hybrid probably varies. But we've got a lot of digging and a lot of publishing before we can see that. Real quickly, the most recent work we've done was at the Holy Family Church. This was a French church built in 1799 on the site of the mission that was built in 1699. And so we did some work off to the side of it. I'm just gonna buzz through this. We put in three test units, found a deeply stratified and very complicated site. We had one week and it rained really hard. And Dr. Dwayne Esri kind of devised this scaffolding and tarp system and guttering system that kept us working under a really hard rain. And it was a spectacular week. We found layers. Most of these sites aren't stratified. This isn't the Middle East where one city is built on the ruins of another city. Basically you get down to a ground surface and it's been there at that ground surface since prehistory. In the enclosure around Holy Family, there is a cultural stratification just because it was so enclosed and stuff started building up. And it's a spectacular site. You know, we haven't analyzed the material in that way. I don't have artifact illustrations yet, but we have these sequences that we were able to identify. But this line here was incredibly important. And it was a distinct break in the stratigraphy and in all the features. And what it probably represents is actually an event. Usually if someone says that they can see an event in the archeological record, they're probably wrong. Because any event you know about is joined by a million you don't know about that didn't make it into the paper record. But it was as if someone had taken a bulldozer across this and everything underneath it was pre-1760 and everything above it was post-1760. There was no mixing, it was just beautiful. And we know that the 18th century equivalent of a bulldozer did come to Holy Family. And that was the British Army. They took the place over as a barracks. And it had already been abandoned for a number of years. And they were told to clear and tear down the old outbuildings and clear the trees and make it habitable again. And I think we're seeing that clearing event right here. So this is a really important zone for us to analyze there. And in that zone we found part of a house, a pit cellar or a depression underneath a dwelling that was filled very early, before 1740. And we know a little bit about what was going on. There was a drawing made in 1735 by the priest that was stationed at Holy Family of the church compound. And he showed a number of things. This is his church here. He shows slave dwellings, he shows the rectory, he even shows where the outhouse is. So we were able to kind of roughly overlay his map because he did show us some landmarks that still exist today. And we were digging under here, which was the location of slave housing. And it could be that what we saw there then is an architectural feature associated with a slave dwelling that predates 1740, which is remarkable. And so we're still looking at that material. Let's go down to Fort Deschartes then. We've looked at Cahokia, we'll go down to Fort Deschartes and that locale. We've been doing some research at the site of one of the forts. There's several forts that are set up in this area. They have to keep rebuilding them because A, the river keeps flooding and B, they seem to be rather sloppy builders for a long time. And so they start in 1719. I don't have time to go through all this, but I put it up because I wanted to make a point that they basically, the records indicate that there were at least three forts. And we used to call the Stone Fort the third one. We've re-examined the records. We realized there was another one in there before the Stone Fort. And we have written records and correspondence, but we have no image of the village at all. We don't know how it was, but this is the capital of French Illinois. It was the New Orleans of the Midwest. That's how it functioned. It was a port. It's where you took all the wheat that was grown in Illinois and sent it down to New Orleans. And if it was a bad wheat year in Illinois, half of New Orleans would starve. This was a big deal. So, and it's also the place where we interface with all of the native populations to the north. It's a really important place to the French government. It turned out not to work out too well for them. It wasn't profitable, but they didn't know yet. And so Chartres was really intended to be New Orleans too. And we don't even have a plat map of it. All we have is this kind of sketch of it that was drawn 30 years after the place was abandoned. And because of the flooding, this is all that we have now. This is the levee and here's a modern road. This is what's left of the village, very little. In 1980, Terry Norris was looking at a 1928 aerial photograph found this strange little stain in the ground. There's your stone fort. We knew that fort one was down here. We didn't know where fort two was and we didn't know there was a fort three at the time. You can see why everybody was excited that here it is. And it's a square with these nodes on the corners that line up very much to what's called the Vauban plan of fortification. It was a French engineer who devised this ideal, strategically ideal way of building forts in the 17th century. And most colonial forts followed this to some degree. So in the early 1980s, based on that photographs, ISU went out and did some limited archeology there. And they assumed that it was the first fort, the one that was built in 1719. And that's what it was called for a number of years. The assumption was based primarily, I don't know, things have changed. But one of their arguments was that the ground surface stain showed only two bastions and the original fort was written of as having only two bastions. But as you can see, it has four. This one was damaged by erosion, but this one did indeed have four bastions. And also the artifacts they recovered were too new. Fort one was there for a very brief time, about five or six years, beginning in 1719 or 1720. And these were all post 1830 artifacts that were found at that fort. So we, where are we? We were at the third fort, a fort that was built, basically fort one was built in 1719. They enlarge it and that's what we call fort two. It's been washed away by the river for a long time. That's the reason they built this one up further up slope to get out of the water. And so what was discovered in the aerial photograph in the 1980s was indeed a French fort that dates to about 1733. And it was used until about 1755. And we did a little bit of work and here's where we were working. Again, this was on private property with private funding. There was no road work plan. Okay, cool. Here's that aerial photograph stain. And here's our excavation. So you can see we're on this end of the, I think I pointed to the wrong bastion on the other slide, but we're here on that stain. And again, we did it the old fashioned way with test units the first season and we found a lot of features. And they were exactly the kind of features that one would expect to find at a fort. Forts leave pretty impressive archeological footprints because you have to put, again, those stockade walls in pretty deep trenches if you want to keep the enemy from just pushing their way into your fortification. And I say enemy, but Fort Deschartes didn't see battles. Fort Deschartes was a military and governmental center and it was a place to regulate trade. It was a warehouse with soldiers. That's what the function of Fort Deschartes was for the most, in most times. Although certainly if there was concerns of a native attack or something, people could go to the fort for protection. But anyway, we found really interesting deep trenches where they had built the fort walls and actually rebuilt them. You can see, I won't bore you with this, but this represents pulling old posts and replacing them with new ones. And we have documents. We know what year they did that. The thing about forts and the French is there's a lot of paperwork. And so this was pretty cool. It was lining up with the archival record pretty impressively. We found some other features associated with what was going on inside that bastion. This was a very shallow, something that looked like a cistern maybe. So we had enough to merit going back. In the second year, we brought out the backhoes because we found for one thing that the topsoil had been basically replaced. The old 18th century topsoil was gone. It had no artifacts in it. And it had been replaced by alluvium that had flooded in there since. So we just pulled it off and we were able to begin to outline some pretty impressive archeological features. Here's your trenches here for the fort and all kinds of things happening inside. This is what we think we have. We have part of that bastion and then part of what's a supporting wall or the edge of a banquette, which is essentially a way to build up earth behind the wall so people can walk and look over the wall from the inside. We have a cistern next to a very ephemeral small building that's in one corner of the, or it's in one of the bastions. And then again, what we call activity pits. We don't know what they are. They're just a hole you dig in the ground and then when you're done, you throw some garbage in it. What was strange is what was going on outside the fort. We found all these trenches here that just we didn't chase them anymore. They just kept going. They were very ephemeral. They were very shallow. They couldn't have been anything structural. And they're probably, I think they're garden fencing. I think these are garden plots probably for feeding people in the fort. I don't know. But we also found strange stoneware vessels out there that we don't find anywhere else. I don't know. But what's interesting is that when you are the French military and you're following that old 17th century plan on how to be the most strategic and build these forts, one of the most important things is to have a glace. It's a blank area around the fort so no one can sneak up on you. And soldiers are always being sent out there to cut brush and keep it clear. And what you can see here is that that's just not a much of a concern anymore. You see that domestic life is kind of creeping up on the fort. Where you just basically can start building fences that somebody can hide behind. But it didn't matter. This was a quiet place. And what I think we're looking at are people just basically trying to make a living while they're stationed at the fort. And at the fort you expect to find 40 kind of things. Military stuff, right? Gun parts, ammo, cannonballs. We got a little bit of ammunition. Nothing like we found in John's backyard. And instead we found lots of domestic artifacts. That's what we found in that bastion. The archeological expression of the portion of the fort we've examined so far says much more about what it's like to live there as a human being and as a French colonial resident than it does what it's like to get all ready for battle. That's not what we're seeing in the fort. And life was pretty good. These are wick trimmers for candles. A brass ornamental wick trimmer. You don't need one of these to survive on the French colonial frontier. I found two of these in the same pit. You know, these are consumers. And they're living well. This earthenware plate, it looks like they were outfitting the mess halls with plates that were probably made to order for the military in Western France. We never find these in domestic settings. Found lots of medicine bottles in a pit. We almost never find these bottles in domestic context. We found seven in one pit alone. And that suggests that perhaps along with this lovely little apothecary jar that was actually made in Amsterdam, that we might be looking at the fort surgeon. That might be what's going on here in this particular bastion. And pipes, you know, here's your British pipes, but also the stone pipes. And I was talking about how there's lots of evidence that the French were making them as well. Someone was making one inside the fort. They were busy drilling the bowl out when the neck broke. It's an unfinished pipe. So either this is a Native American working inside the fort and making a pipe, or it's a French soldier making a pipe. I don't think it matters who. I think both were doing it. And then here's this, the classic Catlinite or redstone pipe that was brought in and part of that very mixed culture, even in this military and governmental setting. Well, you even found part of the fort, bits of old sun-dried mud and so on that was probably used to fill in between the logs of the stockade. Real quickly, down to Prairie de Rocher. It's a little satellite village near the fort, agricultural. This site is a little bit later. Margaret Brown dug this, again, kind of salvaged because it's at the edge of a cemetery and the cemetery was expanding. Once the cemetery has been consecrated, the only thing that can happen there are burials. So she wanted to get this out of the way first. She found a massive and complex site, but the heart of what she found was a very late period for French colonial purposes. It's after the French regime. And it's this Creole-style house here. Now you have, again, built up on sills, houses that are starting to feel modern. This is a basement, this is a true basement. Exterior entrance, support for a double fireplace upstairs. Probably looks something like this. It's a Creole-style that appears late in the 18th century and goes into the 19th. This is a late 18th century building in St. Genevieve. And they found, you know, when you find the stonework, it's roughly dressed. We don't have a lot of masons here in the colony. And when you do, they're usually working for the military. And they started calling these the fort stones. They're surmising the fort had been abandoned when this building was built. And it was almost immediately scavenged and salvaged by the locals for all that stone. And the masons who built the fourth fort in the 1750s used pretty rough stone except around doorways and gun ports and that kind of thing, where you start to see much more finished work. And they surmised that these were actually salvaged from Fort Deschartes and built into this Creole house as the fort was standing in ruins. Margaret was digging it by herself, finishing up one day. And she was digging in this corner and she saw this sticking out of the ground, this intact jug. And you can imagine what she thought was in there, you know, it was dirty water. But it was remarkable because it's an intact object. And it was tucked into a pit in the floor. And it just shows you that, you know, these spaces are active living spaces. And this was some way of keeping whatever that was very cool and very dark in the corner of the cellar. And it was still there after they abandoned the house. Again, the reason we like the 18th century so much as anthropologists is that material culture still reflects these core tenets, the things that we are interested in when we study people and culture. You know, folkways, ethnicity, regional tradition, identity, you know, what it is to be a certain place of a certain kind of person in a certain place with a certain heritage. The 18th century, the artifacts from the 18th century still give us that, they still pay off. Places like Louviere are a little bit more of a problem because they are being occupied during an era of mass production and mass distribution. I mean, the Industrial Revolution, remember, that's the 18th century. It's happening early. And factory made ceramics, for instance, were pioneered by the British, were consumed by most of Western Europe by the 1760s. So what we're starting to deal with isn't, you know, those core heritage and custom related objects and concepts. We're starting to deal with mass production and international marketing. That's different. That's not Anthropology 101 anymore. And here's an example of the problem. These are artifacts right here found at the Louviere site in that French Creole house. They had French names. They probably lived in that neighborhood for two generations. They were speaking French. They were making French recipes. They were singing French songs after dark. It was a French place. But this stuff that they dropped, their household garbage, looks exactly like stuff I dug up up here near Springfield, a place called Sangmo Town, dropped by Upland Southerners, who came from Tennessee during the same time period. Material is interchangeable. These people are very different people with very different personal histories, and we can't see the differences anymore. That's a big problem for anthropology, and that's all archeology is, is anthropology. Basically, we're here. This is the beginning. It happened a lot earlier than we think. By the late 18th and early 19th century, the mass production and international marketing makes it so that objects no longer reflect their users' identities, so archeologists then aren't studying classical custom and heritage and the material culture associated with that. They're studying consumer choice, and it's a completely new way of thinking about the artifacts that we're just now figuring out that we have to change our methods. We can't look at these sites like sites even 100 years earlier or certainly not 1,000 years earlier. These aren't folk objects anymore. This is us. This is the beginning of us. We're just studying an earlier version of us, and then I'll close with this slide. We've got well over 60,000 archeological sites mapped in Illinois. Fewer than 50 of them are French colonial, so less than 1%, so technically, we're more fluent in late Woodland than we are in French. This is just a little sliver. Those French faience plates are more rare than most forms of ancient pottery in Illinois, so we're just starting, but we've had a really good glimpse in the last 10 years.