Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 60) stood.” He surmised that the graveyard was located on the southeast end of the settlement and noted that neighbors had found bricks from the old town and were said to remember crisscrossed tree lines that might have delineated the village streets. “Mr. Butler Gonzales’s father (probably the aforementioned Miguel) was the first to plough the field where the town had been,” Scramuzza wrote. “On the river bank cannon balls were still lying on the ground.” In a light-filled basement room on the LSU campus, Rob Mann sits, surrounded by walls of bookshelves crammed with historical and cultural tomes and lab tables covered with sifting boxes. In the wood frames are pieces of bottle glass, a myriad of fragments of ceramics fragments, shards of a smoking pipe, chips and chunks of brick, and other relics — a representative sampling of the found material from his Galveztown dig. “We found good examples of 18th century French pottery such as faience,” Mann says with satisfaction. Such pieces are “a very important time marker because French goods were still in New Orleans, despite the fact that Spain owned the territory … and faience wasn’t imported much after 1800 or 1810.” When the Spanish continued to supply Galveztown, they might have sent pottery. Or a commandant might have brought his household goods with him. Mann fingers a fragment of orange brick, a deep bright color, probably from the chimney of one of the identical houses built on the arpent squares of the village. “We don’t know if they made brick there,” he mentions, but they might have. And there are other brick pieces of a deeper orange color, better fired and denser. “They may have been made UNEARTHING THE PAST In 1924, LSU masters student V.M. Scramuzza completed a thesis about Galveztown in which he reported visiting the site and finding “no remnants are extant … not even a trace of the fort is left but in the springtime when the soil is freshly plowed ” elsewhere and brought in,” Mann offers. This is fascinating work for an historical archeologist and infinitely mysterious. “Galveztown lends itself to asking about larger geopolitical issues,” Mann muses. “We know it was illegal to trade with the British across the bayou although fraternizing definitely took place.” It was documented between British Fort Bute and Spanish Fort St. Gabriel on the Mississippi River. But how much did the settlers at Galveztown interact with the British at Canewood and its fort? Were shards of British ceramics brought in by the refugee settlers that Governor Galvez encountered or later, through trade? Who smoked the pipes found in broken pieces on Glenn Cambre’s land? Who used the glasses and bottles from which these shards and fragments were found? So far, there is only one certainty: Rob Mann knows exactly where each found artifact was located. His team had laid out a 50-meter grid across the grass, taping and PHOTO BY GINI MCKAIN above: Volunteers dig and sift dirt at one of the Galveztown archeological digs supervised by Dr. Robert Mann. right: McAlester map of southeast Louisiana, 1868 60 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009
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