Posted on 08/06/2007 10:55:47 AM PDT by blam
Sifting through history
Long-lost Acadian settlement reveals itself layer by layer in new excavation
By TOM MCCOAG Amherst Bureau | 6:08 AM
Gilbert Losier, of Dieppe, N.B., holds up a metal object he unearthed while participating in the dig at Beaubassin.
A shard of glass and a piece of a pipe, two of the artifacts dug from the earth at the site of what was once an Acadian village.
Amateur archeologists work pits and trenches that dot the field where the Acadian village of Beaubassin once stood. They were participating in a public dig sponsored by Parks Canada."
Archeologist Clarice Valotaire leans into a pit as she scrapes the earth in the hopes of finding artifacts from the Acadian village of Beaubassin."
IT’S 3 p.m. My knees hurt. My back aches. Little pools of sweat form on my glasses, but my eyes never leave the trowel as I scrape the brownish-red earth.
Scrape after scrape turns up nothing as I scratch deeper and deeper into the excavation pit that a Parks Canada archeologist has assigned to me and two others. That archeologist, Charles Burke, is leading a public dig on a ridge on the Nova Scotia side of the New Brunswick border where the Acadian village of Beaubassin once stood.
Another scrape, another and another. Nothing. I stretch my tired hand forward to scrape yet again when the soil before me bursts in a miniature explosion. When the earth settles, a gleaming white tubular object is revealed.
I gingerly grab it with my fingers and look at it carefully. I smile. Without thinking, I exclaim: "I’ve got something!"
My pit mates, Stella and Gilbert Losier, stop scraping and gaze at the object in my hand. It’s obviously missing pieces, but we jointly decide it’s the stem of an Acadian pipe, similar to one Gilbert found hours earlier on the other side of the three-metre-by-three-metre pit we’ve been working in since 10 a.m.
We place my discovery in a small plastic bag with Gilbert’s pipe stem, numerous shards of broken pottery and glass, something that appears to be a metal clip, and a bent piece of heavier metal, all found earlier.
The Losiers immediately return to their scraping, but I pause on the side of the pit and gaze out over the ridge. I see hectare upon hectare of green grass undulating in the wind and the Missaguash River. In the distance, I see what is known today as Tonges Island.
Back in 1676, when Beaubassin was but a four-year-old village, Tonges Island was known as Isle de la Valliere in recognition of its inhabitant, Michel Le Neuf de la Valliere, governor of Acadia. The landlocked island sits on the marsh midway to another ridge on which the remnants of Fort Beausejour stand today.
The Losiers are holding a quiet conversation in French, the language of Beaubassin, so it’s easy to begin daydreaming about the person who had used the pipe I uncovered. I wonder what his or her life was like and why the Acadian settlers, led by Jacques Bourgeois, came to this fertile land on the Isthmus of Chignecto in 1671-72 as an out-migration from Port Royal.
Beaubassin grew, as did the surrounding parish that bore the same name. A 1698 census shows the 28 families living in the parish cleared 182 hectares of land and owned 352 head of cattle. Eventually, the village alone had 22 families.
"What you thinking?" Stella says, interrupting my daydream.
I tell her. She smiles.
"I wonder, too. It’s why I’m here," she says, taking a rest from her scraping. "I’m a descendant of Acadians. This is where my deepest roots are."
I get up and walk around, checking other pits. Vicki Daley has no Acadian ancestry but she jumped at the chance to participate in the Parks Canada-sponsored public dig.
"I’ve always lived so close to these marshes and I’ve always been intrigued by the area’s history," she says.
Two pits over, Camilla Vautour is carefully scraping around a large stone that has broken through the surface as a result of her digging. The St. Ignace, N.B., resident is here for two reasons — she believes she was an archeologist in a previous life, and, like Ms. Losier, she knows her ancestors were here.
Ms. Vautour, a descendant of a Gallant family, has found a few bones, possibly from a cow.
"Who knows, maybe the cow was the property of one of my ancestors," she says as she resumes her slow, meticulous scraping of the earth. But only for a moment.
"You know, I think of all kinds of things as I dig, like, ‘What did the people here do? What did the village look like here?’ "
All of us know that this is the spot where the first battles between the British and the French for control of North America took place. It was also here that the Expulsion of the Acadians began. I return to my pit. As the Losiers and I continue to scrape at the earth with our trowels, we discuss that history.
We know the lands east of the Missaguash River — the boundary between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — were given to the British in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, while the lands to the west were given to the French. The Acadians at Beaubassin were in British territory and repeatedly refused to swear allegiance to the British king. They also wouldn’t move to the French-controlled area on the other side of the river as the French authorities demanded.
That changed in 1750 when an armed British force under Lt.-Col. Charles Lawrence appeared offshore. The French, led by a priest named Jean-Louis Le Loutre, burned Beaubassin to the ground, forcing its residents across the Missaguash into French territory.
The British landed and then built Fort Lawrence, reputedly on the site of Beaubassin’s former church. A year later, noting the strategic importance of the Isthmus of Chignecto, the French responded by building Fort Beausejour on a ridge across the Missaguash.
For four years, little happened. But in 1755, Lt.-Col. Robert Monckton successfully laid siege to Fort Beausejour in the opening battle of a war in which the British ultimately gained control of North America.
Upon entering Fort Beausejour in victory, Lt.-Col. Monckton discovered that 250 to 300 Acadians had been inside during the siege. Even though the fort’s French commander, Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor, admitted that he had forced them to take up arms, the British decided to deport every Acadian from the region.
The roundup started on Aug. 11, 1755, nearly a month before the same process began at Grand Pre and Pisiquid. About 2,000 of the 3,000 Acadians living in the area around Fort Beausejour were deported.
Just as the discussion wanes, Mr. Losier’s trowel scrapes across a metal object and the sound makes our heads turn. We watch intently as he carefully removes the soil from around the object. Finally, he picks up a long thin piece of metal with a very sharp point on one end. It’s fat in the middle and has a not-so-sharp point on the other end.
We assume it’s a nail and show it to Mr. Burke. The archeologist examines it, turning it over in his hands several times.
"It’s definitely from pre-1750, but it isn’t a nail," he says.
"What is it?" we chime in unison.
"Don’t know, something interesting," he says.
We put it into the plastic bag with our other discoveries and guess what it could be. The most plausible theory we come up with is that it may have been a needle used in leather work.
"You guys are talking like archeologists," Mr. Burke says, laughing. "We won’t know until we clean it up and examine it further. We may never know what it is."
He tells us that more than 6,000 artifacts have been discovered in the two weeks of this public dig and he expects many more finds before the dig ends today. All will have to be cleaned and examined before they can really tell their stories.
This isn’t the first dig at Beaubassin, Mr. Burke says. Interest was piqued in the 1950s when an infrared aerial photograph showed several images of basement foundations. The photographer dug and found a foundation but never recorded his findings.
Digs in 1968 and 1986 rediscovered the foundations, but again nothing was properly recorded and the precise locations were lost in the mists of time. Mr. Burke undertook a test dig in 2004, finding a wall and several hundred artifacts, enough to persuade Parks Canada to buy the 56-hectare ridge and declare it a historic site.
This is the first organized archeological dig to take place at Beaubassin. Surveyed grids have been established on the ground, and the site of each pit and the artifacts discovered are being recorded.
"We want this dig, and the ones that will be conducted over the next two years, to define the archeological resources that are here," Mr. Burke says. "It will take time, but by taking the time to do it right, we will ultimately be able to accurately interpret the site."
We resume our scraping. Though we don’t find anything else in the next half-hour, we reluctantly put down our trowels when we’re told the workday is over.
As we hand our plastic bag to Mr. Burke, its contents to be recorded, we lament that many of the artifacts we found are tiny, smaller than a quarter.
Mr. Burke assures us that even pieces that small can help tell the tale of what Beaubassin was like. And that brings smiles to our grimy, sweaty faces.
GGG Ping.
An Acadian pipe?.......well, that explains my Cajun friends.......
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I want to know why no hunks are ever at the digs. Pretty girls and old men. *sheesh*
She does have the most interesting digging site. My 'eyeometer' detected that my eyes spend more time viewing her dig than all the others.
Something You Didn't Know About Cajuns (Ilenos, Canary Islands)
We started off the ferry in Nova Scotia and drove the coast and St. Lawrence to Montreal. One thing that is still a mystery to me is what is "Canadian food"? Seemed pretty American to me. :-))
We very much enjoyed our visit to Louisbourg in 1999 - part of a wonderful visit to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island that involved fishing in the Margaree Valley, the Highlands Inn in Ingonish, and visits to many of the historical sites on both Western and Eastern shores of Nova Scotia. We’ll go back in a few years after a few more ‘must’ trips.
The roundup started on Aug. 11, 1755, nearly a month before the same process began at Grand Pre and Pisiquid. About 2,000 of the 3,000 Acadians living in the area around Fort Beausejour were deported. “
A bit biased here, but then the French are not noted for their veracity. Their Latinate voluptuousness joins with their Gallic laziness and they’s rather spin lies than tell the truth.(A little warping of General Webb’s statement in the Last of the Mohegans).
The facts are a bit more damaging to the Acadians. The French had been fighting in essence a war of surrogates, using Native American Tribes of various denominations, led, directed and armed by small groups of French-Canadians and French officers in a VERY messy butchery directed at British American civilians - men, women and children. The Acadians, despite being given gracious treatment by his Britannic Majesty, which included the kind of religious toleration the French would never have reciprocated towards the British were the situations reversed, CONTINUED to conspire with anti-British indians killing British American civilians in New England. His Britannic Majesty, being a humane man, did not exterminate the troublesome Acadians, but dispersed them throughout the colonies in North America.
My greatest regret is that King George didn’t ship ALL their rascally Gallic butts out of North America after they finally won the French and Indian War.
That only happens once in a while, alas. I mean, the pretty girls at the digs. Mostly, people at digs seem to be like me, kinda ordinary-lookin’.
Yah. Me too. The only men I’ve seen at digs are all too young, two short or far too old. But then, I’m so ordinary, they wouldn’t notice me anyway.
*sigh*
Most cool.
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