We are continuing this field school uncovering
burials that were first uncovered during Katrina.
And we are up to burial number 29, these burials
are being excavated by our students, a very
marvelous learning experience.
And they are being taken back to the lab and
being analyzed and then eventually reburied.
First of all they are learning to work in
a team, they don’t get a lot of opportunities,
your education doesn’t train you to be a
team member very much, and so they're part
of a team and they're living together, and
eating together, and working together for
six weeks and that's an experience that is
really invaluable.
Secondly, a lot of the skills that they're
getting here, a lot of our students are in
administration of justice, and crime scene
documentation a lot of that is very similar
to archeological skills so they're learning
about that and then of course they're learning
about the past, in this case the French colonial
past here on the Gulf coast.
First arrivals for Europeans in this area
was 1699 in D'Iberville, and the French tried
to establish a series of settlements called
concessions.
And they were encouraging people to come over
from France and other European countries but
not Spain, and protect this territory from
Spanish and a little bit of British as well,
and so they had a number of concessions and
this is the Leblanc concession . And unfortunately
what happened is they decided to move the
capitol, the major ports to New Orleans and
Mobile.
And so this sort of faded away and so most
of the settlers kind of moved in both directions.
A lot of the settlers appear to have come
from lower segments of European society.
We can tell that because the skeletal data
shows us that they had periods of severe malnutrition
in childhood and they continued to experience
bouts of malnutrition, famine essentially
levels and maybe even here as well.
And that made them vulnerable to a wide range
of diseases, and some of those diseases did
in fact manifest on the skeleton, and we'll
be doing DNA tests for some of the diseases
as well to pick up on some of that.
So their conditions were a bit harsh, it was
difficult, you know there's a handful of settlers,
most of them were men, a few women, and they're
trying to build and get everything they needed
to live because they weren't getting a lot
from France on boats.
The boats would come every two or three years.
This area wasn’t great for farming so I
would think that they were more interested
in ship building, trading, so establishing
ports for trading in the gulf and they were
making bricks but that was probably for forts,
they were known to build forts.
The Moran arts studio was here and a lot of
the coast residents recognize it's been here
for years, and when Camille hit there was
a bit of structural damage.
They were working to fix that, they discovered
or rediscovered the burials here and uncovered
13 of those back in the 60s.
There were skeletal remains but I think they
assumed they were Native Americans, but we
don’t have any evidence of that, all of
the parts we're getting, the burials, have
features that we would associate with European
ancestry, not Native American ancestry.
We lost so much above ground in Katrina and
I think the thought of different communities
reestablishing themselves up and down the
coast, a community without its history and
heritage feels a little lost, there's no direction,
but the history is still here we just have
to dig for it.
And may the blessing of almighty God, Father
son and holy spirit descend upon each one
of you and remain with you forever, Amen.
