Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 54) In search of An archeological dig uncovers fragments of life at a Spanish outpost in 18th-century Louisiana o ne damp Saturday morning in March of 2008, Rob Mann extracted a dainty, white porcelain shard from a neat, shallow square trench carved into Glen Cambre’s front yard. Carefully turning the fragment over, Mann revealed a lovely floral motif — a pattern of brown stems and green and blue petals and leaves on a white background, hand-painted, delicately sketched. It was a shard of a Chinese export teacup. Rob Mann is Louisiana’s Southeast Regional Archeologist with a professional expertise in historical American archeology. He can identify the teacup and other artifacts unearthed from the Cambre greensward — fragments of French faience and coarse Spanish earthenware, brick rubble, nails, chunks of coal, pieces of bone — as evidence of daily life of the residents of Galveztown, a Spanish colonial community perched at the confluence of Bayou Manchac and the Amite River between 1779 and 1806. But he can’t establish the provenance of the artifacts. Despite the fact that the settlement’s history and significance have been studied and well documented, virtually nothing of Galveztown’s material culture is known. by Mary Ann Sternberg 54 PHO TO BY CKA IM GIN IN Pottery shards are among the artifacts unearthed in archeological digs at the Galveztown site.
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