Abstract:
Fort St. Pierre was a French fort built in 1719 along the Yazoo River near modern-day Vicksburg, Mississippi. The area was home to Yazoo, Koroa, and Ofogoula peoples who were being courted by British merchants supplying trade goods. Unlike many other French frontier forts, this fort was not centered on a religious mission site but instead was intended as a commercial settlement. Despite an auspicious start to the Fort St. Pierre community, the plantation concessions quickly moved operations south. Only a few French individuals and a much reduced military force remained in the Yazoo Bluffs. Fort St. Pierre became an isolated outpost that endured privation, sickness, and a lack of supplies until its final destruction after a massacre in late 1729. Retribution and subsequent French attacks on the Native groups emptied the Yazoo Bluffs region of both colonists and Native inhabitants for close to 100 years. The site of Fort St. Pierre was excavated between 1974 and 1977. For this dissertation project I used new research questions to re-examine the whole artifact collection and field notes. First, I applied a generalizing site assemblage comparison approach using correspondence analysis to determine artifact patterning at contemporaneous French and Native forts, villages, and settlements throughout the Mississippi River corridor. Second, I applied a more individualizing approach to the inhabitants of Fort St. Pierre and their Native neighbors using architecture and associated artifacts, historical maps and documents, and firsthand accounts. This culminated in a chapter discussing daily life, French and Native interactions, and Fort St. Pierre as a failed colonial and sociopolitical endeavor. My project contributes to the field of anthropology by placing the history and events of this fort within the larger narrative of French and Native interactions along the Mississippi River Corridor, as well as providing a mixed-methods approach to whole sites and assemblages which results in a more complete picture of the past, specifically at the case study site of Fort St. Pierre.
