Dirt to Desk: Macrobotanical Analyses From Fort St. Joseph (20BE23) and The Lyne Site (20BE10)

Fort St. Joseph, a seventeenth- to eighteenth-century archaeological site in southwestern Michigan, and the adjacent Lyne site provide a recent and ongoing example of historical archaeology posing questions about the notion of culture contact during French colonialism. Effective research questions, increasingly systematic procedures, and a balance between historical and archaeological material have served to solidify and situate the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project’s contributions to anthropology. Archaeobotanical data analysis of the 2007 flotation remains from Fort St. Joseph (20BE23) and the Lyne site (20BE10), coupled with the 2002 macrobotanical findings from Fort St. Joseph, provides the project with better understanding of the food consumption patterns of both Native and Colonial occupants of the two sites. Archaeobotanical data from these and other colonial era sites shed light on processes of dietary acculturation and the strengths and weaknesses of the archaeological record of subsistence from Historic sites. Prior notions of unidirectional acculturative forces and Indigenous agency are discussed, along with shifts to the inclusion of non-Native plant resources by either Native or Colonial groups. Macrobotanical results for the two sites are viewed against expectations provided by world systems theory and acculturation theory.