Saturday, October 24th @ 4:00 PM – 4:50 PM                                       MYRIAM ARCANGELI                                                                                    Omni Westside Hotel, Houston Texas (open to the public)

“Sherds of History: Domestic Life in Colonial Guadeloupe”

Myriam Arcangeli

Ceramics serve as one of the best-known artifacts excavated by archaeologists. They are carefully described, classified, and dated, but rarely do scholars consider their many and varied uses. Breaking from this convention, Myriam Arcangeli examines potsherds from four colonial sites in the Antillean island of Guadeloupe to discover what these everyday items tell us about the people who used them. In the process, she reveals a wealth of information about the lives of the elite planters, the middle and lower classes, and enslaved Africans.

By analyzing how the people of Guadeloupe used ceramics–whether jugs for transporting and purifying water, pots for cooking, or pearlware for eating–Arcangeli spotlights the larger social history of Creole life. What emerges is a detail rich picture of water consumption habits, changing foodways, and concepts of health. Sherds of History offers a compelling and novel study of the material record and the “ceramic culture” it represents to broaden our understanding of race, class, and gender in French-colonial societies in the Caribbean and the United States.

Arcangeli’s innovative interpretation of the material record will challenge the ways archaeologists analyze ceramics.

Myriam Arcangeli recently earned her doctorate in historical archaeology from Boston University. Her research on colonial-era ceramics in Guadeloupe–the basis for this book–explored the history of Creole culture and proposed a novel and original approach for analyzing and interpreting ceramics. Myriam has been interested in ceramics since the beginning of her career, and her first research projects examined the history of local potteries near Toulouse, in southwestern France. Intrigued by the colonial period, she then left for the United States, where she discovered American archaeology while excavating at Mount Vernon, the plantation home of George Washington. Currently, she is working on publishing her research in both French and English journals, and contributed to the forthcoming The Archaeology of Food: An Encyclopedia, edited by Mary C. Beaudry and Karen B. Metheny.

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 2/3/2015, ISBN: 978-0-8130-6042-2
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