Big finds in the Big Easy

NEW ORLEANS

Archaeologists digging behind St. Louis Cathedral are unearthing nearly three centuries of history: the porcelain head of a tiny doll, an ersatz Colonial-era pipe from the 1800s, bits of pottery that Indians may have traded to the men who built New Orleans.

The current cathedral, completed in 1794, is the third church facing what is now Jackson Square. A small wooden church built for the first colonists gave way in 1727 to a larger, more ornate building. That church burned down in 1778, along with most of the city.

Now the first archaeological excavation ever at St. Louis, one of the nation’s oldest cathedrals, is turning up bits and pieces from the lives of people who lived and worshipped there.

There’s been a lot of digging in the fenced rectangle behind the cathedral called St. Anthony’s Garden. Variously in history, it has held a real garden; an encampment for people left homeless by the “Great Fire” of 1788; an ice cream pavilion and flower market; and, after a 1915 hurricane, a temporary chapel.

But until now there has never been an archaeological excavation anywhere on cathedral property, said cathedral spokeswoman Nancy Averett. After Hurricane Katrina toppled the garden’s live oak and sycamore trees in August 2005, the cathedral secured a Getty Foundation grant to restore the garden and further dig into its history.

“What stories could be told,” said Betty Norris, a neighborhood resident who happened on a recent open house at which University of Chicago archaeology students and assistant professor Shannon Lee Dawdy, who is supervising the dig, showed some of their finds.

The biggest find so far was at Ms. Norris’ feet.

Next to an alley between the cathedral and the rectory - perhaps extending under the spot where Ms. Norris stood - were probably the earliest remnants of European settlement in New Orleans, Ms. Dawdy told the Associated Press on Thursday. There, the dig uncovered what may be some of the area’s first Indian trade goods.

Fragments of American Indian pottery, some painted red and others tempered with crushed shells, were mixed about equally with French artifacts from the early 1700s - bits of ceramics and the bottom of a wine bottle.

At about the same level, a thin ‘L’ of darker dirt indicates a spot where men lived while clearing trees for the settlement founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste le Moyne as Sieur de Bienville.

Researchers had only found one line of that ‘L’ by Tuesday of last week. It might, Ms. Dawdy said then, be a wall from a temporary hut. The next day, she became much more certain, because they unearthed a square post-hole - a sign of French axes - and the line of a wall heading back toward the cathedral.

“It’s at an angle - not lining up with the street grid established in 1724 - which is why I think it predates it,” Ms. Dawdy said in the interview, contemplating what could be the very start of the settlement.

Ms. Dawdy, who has worked on digs in New Orleans for nearly 15 years, said the unglazed, red-painted pottery is of a type found in smaller quantities elsewhere in the French Quarter.

The bits uncovered bear some similarities to Creek and Choctaw pottery and may indicate that Choctaw Indians, known to have traded at the old French Market through the early 1800s, were in the area a century earlier, “creating an economy specifically to interact with the French,” Ms. Dawdy said.

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