Archaeological Completion Report Series, Number 11
From the book: “Research on House C of the Southeast Row House provides a view of life inside the 18th century fur trading and military post of Fort Michilimackinac … Analysis of House C included the use of numerous historic documents and archaeological data from several seasons of field work at Michilimackinac. In the resulting interpretation both types of data are used to complement and test each other. The history of the fort, the fur trade, and the house owners was revealed as far as records permitted, and this information is correlated with the artifact assemblages, both in terms of content and spatial distribution, to provide details about activities and behavior inside the house and part of its garden. …
The focus of this research project is the archaeological remains of a structure lived in by Europeans. Its formal designation today is House C of the Southeast Row House, but in the 18th century it was a dwelling facing the parade ground and bordering the narrow Rue de la Babillarde (Street of Gossip) in back. There were several row houses inside the fort, each a long building divided into separate, privately owned compartments … Originally House C was the home of a large family of French Canadians, but after rebuilding its function appears to have become a warehouse and possibly a temporary summer residence for a fur trader or traders. The following report addresses first the documentary evidence and insights from previous excavations inside the fort and then discusses specifically the stratigraphy and artifacts from House C. …
The conclusions… may be useful for further anthropologically-oriented research of frontier subsistence, settlement growth, systemic change in the fur trade, and so on. … ”
“Halchin’s analyses of the history of the structure, the procurement and processing of food, and the evidence of commercial trade provide a comparative baseline for the study of other houses in the fort and elsewhere… This is a fine report…Halchin has provided a superior ethnoarchaeological study of a unique structure which witness a major transition in early regional colonial history.” – Charles C. Kolb Ethnohistory
