'The peculiar circumstances of this army': An archaeological study of Anglo-American cultural variability along the Seven Years' War frontier

This dissertation proposes an archaeological model of colonial military frontiers. Frontier contexts have long held the attention of scholars, even to the point that specific forms of frontier settlement have been identified in minute detail. Military frontiers are included among this number, but unfortunately they have not often been the settlement type of choice among frontier scholars. More often than not these contexts have been deemed analytically uninteresting, suitable only for "drum-and-trumpet" efforts to study battlefield tactics, describe the minutiae of military life, or re-fight old battles. This study advocates a very different perspective on military frontiers. Such contexts are seen as integral to the larger process of colonization, representing the means by which colonial states expanded their physical presence into new regions and maintained an effective core policy in peripheries. At the same time, military frontiers are also seen as important loci of cultural contact between diverse frontier military populations. Such contact was not experienced across the large-scale spatial and temporal contexts tying periphery to core, but rather within more restricted, face-to-face contexts and in the daily practices of frontier communities. In short, this study recognizes the multi-scalar issues involved in military frontier contexts and presents these in the form of a comprehensive military frontier model.;This multi-scalar frontier model serves as the basis for a series of specific archaeological hypotheses and material expectations, each of which is tested against Anglo-American archaeological data relating to the Seven Years' War in northeastern North America (ca. 1754-1763). The Seven Years' War signaled the final struggle between the colonial empires of England and France for North American hegemony, one that ultimately defined the imperial character of the Atlantic world and shaped the colonial trajectory of North America. Begun in earnest in the remote forests of the Ohio Valley, the war would eventually spark conflict across the global colonial landscape and culminate into what some have called the first true world war. But while the conflict itself was a global-scale event, it was still played out in small-scale spatial and temporal contexts: individual frontier military settlements incorporating groups of diverse cultural backgrounds that were united in overall political aims but divergent in many other respects. Thus, while a focused examination of these military settlements cannot be divorced from their larger, external political contexts, such broad contexts must in turn not obscure the more localized processes of cultural diversity and interaction characteristic of all peripheral military environments. It is the intent of this research to understand the nature of such small-scale cultural diversity as existed between imported British regulars forces and their indigenous American provincial allies along the Seven Years' War military frontier, as can be observed archaeologically.