Creole Identity Formation on the Colonial and Early American Frontiers

FAIN: RZ-50466-05

Northwestern State (Natchitoches, LA 71497-0001)
David W. Morgan (Project Director: November 2004 to January 2009)

Archaeological research on the late 17th-century plantation house of Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, the principal ancestral figure of modern Louisiana Creoles, located in the Cane River Creole community of northwest Louisiana. (24 months)

This project seeks funds for two years of archaeological research on the Cane River Creole community of northwest Louisiana. The goal is to explore the contribution of African heritage to the construction of Creole culture in Louisiana during the late 1700s and early 1800s. This project focuses on the plantation of Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, the principal Creole ancestral figure. She was either a native African or a first generation descendant of enslaved Africans, and she and her children were enslaved, freed, and became plantation owners. We will excavate Coincoin’s home in order to compare it to her son’s and examine the ways in which patterns of material culture associated with this family and their slaves changed between generations.

Associated Products

African Earthen Structures in Colonial Louisiana: Architecture from the Coincoin Plantation (1788-1816) (Article)
Title: African Earthen Structures in Colonial Louisiana: Architecture from the Coincoin Plantation (1788-1816)
Author: Kevin C. MacDonald
Author: David W. Morgan
Abstract: Coincoin, probably of Kongo parentage, was born a slave, became the concubine of a French planter, Pierre Metoyer, bore him ten children, and in 1787 was settled by him on a plantation of her own. Locating and excavating her house, the authors discovered it to be a type of clay-wall building known from West Africa. The house, together with an adjacent clay boundary wall, was probably built by slaves of Bight of Biafra origin loaned from the neighbouring plantation of her ex-partner. These structures are witness to emerging initiatives and interactions among people of African descent—but different African origins—in eighteenth-century Louisiana.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9428953&fileId=S0003598X00062529
Primary URL Description: Cambridge Journals Online
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Antiquity
Publisher: Antiquity Publications Ltd.

Colonoware in Western Colonial Louisiana: Makers and Meaning (Book Section)
Title: Colonoware in Western Colonial Louisiana: Makers and Meaning
Author: David W. Morgan
Author: Kevin C. MacDonald
Editor: Kelly, Kenneth
Editor: Hardy, Meredith
Abstract: In the archaeology of colonial and antebellum African America one of the most evocative artifact classes is low-fired earthenware. The blanket term usually applied to this category –colonoware – has entered the archaeological vocabulary rather uncritically despite its deeply contested meaning. In this chapter we examine how colonoware has been used as a category in Louisiana archaeology; consider the ways in which life in the French/Spanish colony – different in many ways from life in the English colonies – might effect the development and use of low-fired earthenwares; and consider methods one might use to explore inter and intra-regional diversity in this ceramic technology. When comparing contact period and early colonial Native American pottery assemblages with late colonial to early American period Euro-African pottery assemblages it is apparent that low-fired earthenwares go from being the only available ceramic in northwest Louisiana in the mid 1600s to a seemingly obsolete ware by about 1830. Simultaneously, as Euro-American wares came to dominate the vessels being used at plantations, urban homes, and Native American villages, the amount of decorated low-fired earthenwares became increasingly sparse. In terms of makers, there are strong correspondences between the Coincoin colonowares and known Native American decorated types of the historic period, particularly as they relate to the Caddo and possibly the Apalachee, Choctaw, Natchez, and Coushatta, but this does not rule out the possibility of African production. Additional technical analyses, perhaps focused on untempered wares, may clarify this issue.
Year: 2011
Publisher: University of Florida Press
Book Title: The Historical Archaeology of French America: Louisiana and the Caribbean
ISBN: 978-0-8130-368

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