Tea at Trianon: Artifacts from the Colony of Avalon

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Artifacts from the Colony of Avalon

Founded by the Calverts. From Smithsonian:

The coastal Colony of Avalon in Ferryland was chartered by the British statesman George Calvert in 1623. Today, it’s considered one of the best-preserved early English colonial sites in North America. Archaeologists have been conducting major excavations at the site since the 1990s, and they typically find about 3,000 artifacts every week during dig seasons.

This summer, Calum Brydon, an archaeologist at Memorial University, was investigating the ruins of an Avalon storage room when he saw the wampum.
“When I first found it, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was,” Brydon tells CBC News’ Henrike Wilhelm. “There was part of me that realized it’s a shell bead, and it just didn’t quite click.”
“Wampum” is an English word derived from an eastern Algonquian term that means “strings of white.” Indigenous groups of northeastern North America carved the beads from shells of quahog (clams) and whelk (sea snails). They incorporated the beads into belts and necklaces, which were sometimes used to mark important events. Later, they may have used the beads to trade with European settlers.

“The wampum [were] likely brought to Ferryland through trade or exchange with Dutch or New England merchants who had previously traded or exchanged wampum with Indigenous peoples,” Memorial University archaeologist Barry Gaulton, the director of the excavations, tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. (Read more.)