Terraforming Arcadia: An Archaeological Perspective on French Wetland Agriculture in Nova Scotia
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-12-14

From the 1630s until their deportation in the 1750s, the French inhabitants of colonial Nova Scotia  (the Acadians) created a subsistence economy rooted in the dyking and draining of tidal marshes. They  knew a good thing when they saw it. While their cousins in the Saint Lawrence Valley struggled to feed  livestock through the punishing Canadian winters and wrested pasturelands from region's formidable  forests, the French inhabitants of the Bay of Fundy and its estuaries presided over 75,000 acres of lush  tidal marshes.  These  environments  produced  virtually  limitless fodder  in  the  form  of  salt‐tolerant  grasses  and  yielded  remarkably  fertile  arable  land  when  dammed  and  drained.  Much  of  it  is  still  farmed today.  The historiography of French colonial wetland agriculture is interesting, partly because remnant dyke  walls and enclosed fields are seen as monuments to French colonial culture. Their commemoration as  a  cultural  achievement  has  become  something  of  a  trope  to  nationalist  writers  and  the  heritage  apparatus,  and  academic  research  has  also  taken  an  avid  interest.  Historians  and  historical  geographers  have  contributed  to  a  better  understanding  of  dyking  technology,  it  origins,  and  the  manner in which it was transferred from Europe to North America. The outputs of this agricultural  system are also now reasonably well understood, although more work remains to be done here.  Archaeology has been all but absent from the conversation. In this paper, I will demonstrate how an  empirically grounded and theoretically informed archaeology contributes to a better understanding  of  French  wetland  agriculture.  A  material  cultural  approach  is  already  significantly  expanding  the  evidence base by excavating and analyzing dykeland infrastructure such as wooden sluices. Married  to remote sensing and dendrochronology, it is allowing us to date the developmental sequences by  which  kin‐based  labour  successively  enclosed  thousands  of  acres  of  wetlands,  while  insights  from  Anthropology and ethnohistory provide new perspectives (and raise some new questions) about the  meaning of wetland agriculture in the context of an Indigenous landscape.  

Jonathan Fowler  Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Session 4: Rural Heritage and Landscapes (2)
CHAT Annual Conference Orkney 2016: Rurality