From: http://museum.gov.ns.ca/arch/infos/infoaca1.htm
Trading
Although the Acadians were remarkably self-sufficient there were some things they could not make or grow themselves, and for these needs they established trading links with New England and with other French settlements. Molasses, cooking pots, board axes, clay pipes, gunpowder, fabrics, and rum came through New England. Through Louisbourg they obtained cottons, thread, lace, firearms and religious items from France. The Acadians were fond of smoking (both men and women smoked): their clay pipes came mostly from England, although at times they did make their own, using local red clay. In return for these items, the Acadians traded grain from the fertile marshlands, cattle well-fed on salt-marsh hay, and furs they had obtained from trapping and trade with the Mi'kmaq. The objects illustrated in this painting represent artifacts recovered from Acadian archaeological sites or listed in the inventories of ships that actually traded with the Acadians.

Community Life
Like many people isolated by circumstances, the Acadians had a strong sense of community and performed many tasks together. One of the most important of these was the regular maintenance of the dykes. Another, which was much enjoyed, occurred when a young couple married. The whole village would gather to help clear land and to build a house for them. It became an occasion for work, fun, food and celebration. Music on these occasions was often provided by fiddles and jaw harps.
For more than a hundred years the Acadians were able to maintain their self-contained lifestyle, enjoying their large families and peaceful communities, strengthened by a firm sense of religion. They lived on friendly terms with their immediate neighbours, the Mi'kmaq Indians, and profited from their trading links with New England and other French settlements. By preference, they had no strong ties with either France or England, and tried to avoid confrontation with them.
In some sense, it was their very isolation from the influence of these major colonial powers, coupled with the impact of the marshland landscape which was their home, which helped the Acadians to establish and maintain their unique way of life.

From http://museum.gov.ns.ca/arch/infos/infoaca2.htm
There was little that influenced the development of the Acadian way of life quite as much as their method of farming. Fortunately, among the people who settled in the Annapolis Basin area, there were some who were already familiar with methods of dyking practiced in France, and they recognized the agricultural potential of the tidal salt marshes.
The new settlers moved quickly to build dykes along the outer marsh areas. Sometimes these dykes were built by driving five or six rows of logs into the ground, laying other logs one on top of the other between these rows, filling all the spaces between the logs with well packed clay and then covering everything over with sods cut from the marsh itself. Sometimes dykes were built by simply laying marsh sods over mounds of earth.
The Acadians devised a system of drainage ditches combined with an ingenious one-way water gate called an aboiteau. The aboiteau was a hinged valve in the dyke which allowed fresh water to run off the marshes at low tide but which prevented salt water from flowing onto the dyked farmland as the tide rose.
After letting snow and rain wash away the salt from the marshes for between two and four years the Acadians were left with fertile soil which yielded abundant crops.
The Acadians were sometimes called lazy by the French and by settlers from other communities. They were referred to as défricheurs d'eau (clearers of water) because they built dykes and cultivated the natural meadows and marshes, rarely clearing the upland forests for agricultural purposes. But today we can appreciate the wisdom of their approach because we now know that, with the agricultural methods employed at the time, the marshlands were more productive than the uplands would have been.
Their use of salt-marsh hay as feed for cattle is a good example of this. When the Acadians settled on the marshlands, they discovered a coarse salt hay (spartina) that grew there naturally even when the marshes were covered twice daily by the tides. Their use of this hay proved to be very important for the stability and self-sufficiency of their communities.
You have to remember that the agricultural revolution had hardly begun in Britain when the Acadians settled in Nova Scotia and that effective techniques for sowing grass seed to raise hay as a field crop had not yet been developed. In fact, the common practice of many settlements in the New World was to butcher most of the farm animals in the fall, because of the difficulty of gathering enough fodder to keep them over the winter. As you can imagine, such settlements were very much at the mercy of external sources of supply for new animals in the spring.
The Acadians overcame this problem by their exploitation of the natural marsh grasses. After they had built dykes, and drained and dried the marshlands, finer grasses gradually replaced the coarser spartina which had thrived on the tidal flats.
But the Acadians continued to cut their salt hay on the seaward side of the dykes, where the land was covered by the tides as least in the spring and fall of the year and sometimes twice daily throughout the year. They harvested this hay with scythes and stacked it to dry on wooden platforms called staddles in English. These staddles were usually built just tall enough to raise the salt hay above the level of the highest seasonal tides.
The Acadians were thus able to maintain large numbers of cattle throughout the winter months, a feat which would have been impossible without salt-marsh hay.
Before 1755 the Acadians lived largely self-sufficient lives on their marshland farms. They tilled the soil and it yielded abundant crops of wheat, oats, barley, rye, peas, corn, flax and hemp. They also kept gardens in which they grew beets, carrots, parsnips, onions, chives, shallots, herbs, salad greens, cabbages and turnips. Cabbages and turnips seem to have been particularly important in their diet.
The Acadians kept cattle and sheep. Pigs roamed freely in the forest behind the houses and also fed on kitchen scraps and, in winter especially, on leaves and peelings from the cabbages and turnips which the Acadians often stored covered with straw in their gardens until they were needed. They seem to have eaten a lot of pork but relatively little beef, preferring to keep their cattle for milk, as working animals (i.e. as oxen), and for trade.
The Acadians supplemented what they produced on their small farms by hunting and fishing. They even brewed their own spruce and fir beer.
Theirs was a hard life but a good one, lived in a landscape which they understood and which they made work for them.

From: http://museum.gov.ns.ca/arch/infos/infoaca3.htm
In the summer of 1983 the Nova Scotia Museum sponsored an archaeological dig at a pre-expulsion Acadian farm site at Belleisle in Annapolis County, N.S. Even before they began, the archaeologists knew that this site was promising. A test excavation had been carried out a decade earlier on what appeared to be an old cellar at the edge of the Belleisle marsh. That cellar turned out to be all that remained of an early eighteenth-century Acadian dwelling abandoned since about 1755.
More could be learned about Acadian life from a more thorough investigation of the site. There was so much more to know. For example, what sort of houses had the Acadians lived in at that period? What had their day-to-day lives been like? There were some vague descriptions in documents of the period, but nothing that gave very clear answers to such questions.
The results of the research were very revealing. Of course, it's important to realize that archaeologists seldom excavate entire buildings with all their contents (this was certainly not the case at Belleisle). Archaeologists need to have the sort of skills that one would ordinarily expect of a Sherlock Holmes: they try to build as complete a picture as possible of what happened at a particular place and at a particular time on the basis of whatever clues they are able to dig up.
What clues did the archaeologists discover at Belleisle, and what did the evidence tell them? Certainly the largest clue they found was a well-preserved house foundation of local field stones, two rows wide and three to four stones high. The outside dimensions of the foundation were 11.5 m by 7.5 m, indicating a somewhat larger single-room house than one might have pictured based on written descriptions of the period.
The heavy foundation suggests the use of large timbers for the frame of the house. Further, although there is no direct evidence of how the walls were constructed, there is plenty of indirect evidence that they were made of wood. For example, the quantities of stone and brick found on the site were not large enough to indicate they were used for walls. But lots of nails were uncovered. These point to the extensive use of wood as a building material.
The other interesting clue suggesting wooden walls was the discovery of large quantities of a kind of walling material made of local clay mixed with marsh hay for strength. One surface of the walling was covered with a white clay slip, giving a plaster-like surface. The other side still retains a wood-grain impression reflecting the application of the clay to a wooden wall.
These clues suggest that the outside walls of the Belleisle house were made of wood and that they were lined on the inside with white-slipped clay. Another interesting implication of all this is that the house would probably have been reasonably bright and pleasant on the inside.
Other building materials discovered included fragmentary pieces of cut and bundled marsh hay, suggesting that this readily-available local material was used to thatch the roof. In addition, pieces of window glass were found, as were iron door hinges and even an extraordinarily well-preserved door lock.
The most distinctive architectural feature discovered at Belleisle was the base of a circular oven and fireplace complex unlike any other found in North America. The base and exterior walls of the oven were made of the same field stones used in the foundation of the house, and it seems to have been lined with clay. The oven door was probably at the back of the fireplace, inside the house.
The fireplace appears to have been lined with rough locally-made bricks. In front of the fireplace opening was a piece of blue slate measuring 30 cm square by 5 cm thick, along with numerous fragments of the same material, suggesting that the hearth may have been tiled with slate.
Such clues, although scanty, provided the archaeologists with a pretty clear picture of what this house would have looked like. They were able to describe the house so clearly to our Museum artist that he could paint pictures of it. The results of that process are displayed in both of the paintings reproduced in this INFO.
But we were not only interested in what the Acadians' houses looked like. We wanted to discover as much as we could about their lives. We can learn a lot about people's lives by looking at the things they use from day to day. Consider for a moment what plastic grocery bags, Kleenex tissues, computers, Big Mac boxes, shopping centres and disposable diapers reveal about us. We hoped that the things we found at Belleisle would reveal as much about the lives of pre-expulsion Acadians.
We were in luck. The archaeologists dug up a very rich collection of bits and pieces of things that the people who had lived in this house would have used from day to day. Remember that, most often, archaeologists only find fragments of objects. They seldom find a whole earthenware mixing bowl or an uncorroded table knife. They almost never find any remains of artifacts that decompose, such as things made from wood or other organic materials. Archaeologists have to be patient detectives in search of small clues.
At Belleisle the detectives were rewarded. They found fragments of earthenware mugs, mixing bowls, bottles, plates, storage jars and pitchers, as well as the remains of a cup, a serving dish, a collander and a porringer. They found bits and pieces of stoneware tankards, glass bottles and wineglasses, parts of eleven table knives, three furniture hinges and a drawer pull.
In the class of artifacts relating to clothes, of course, nothing made of cloth or leather survived, but buckles, buttons, parts of hook-and-eye fasteners, as well as straight pins, needles, awls, a spindle whorl and portions of 5 pairs of scissors were uncovered.
Seven coins were found, the oldest dating to the mid-1670s. Three clasp knives were discovered (the grandparents of our jack-knives). A particularly lovely small glass dove was uncovered which the archaeologists think may have been part of a rosary. In addition, the excavation produced a brass crucifix, a large number of clay tobacco pipes and two little musical instruments called jew's harps.
Finally, the archaeologists found a musket ball, 86 gun flints, parts of three smooth-bored muskets, one file, two rasps (called floats), six fish hooks and a two-tined iron fork for haying.
Some of these objects were made by the Acadians themselves, but most of them were manufactured in England, France, Spain, Germany, Holland or New England and obtained through trade. Once we realize this, it modifies the idea of Acadian communities in the 17th century as being completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Another interesting class of objects collected by the archaeologists was animal bones. All the bones were analysed at the National Museums' Zooarchaeological Identification Centre in Ottawa. Interestingly enough, although there were some bones from wild animals and birds (black bear, fox, snowshoe hare, northern pintail, gadwall and passenger pigeon), almost 96% of the remains were from domestic animals (cows, pigs, sheep and chickens).
Another fascinating fact this analysis revealed was that most of the domestic animal bones seem to have come from the cheaper cuts of meat, suggesting that the choicer cuts were sold or traded for other things needed by the Acadian farmers who lived in this house.
As you can imagine, all the things that the archaeologists dug up at Belleisle have given us a much clearer notion of Acadian life than we ever had before. Much of what we have learned is reflected in the Azor Vienneau paintings that are reproduced in these INFOs and in the film series, Premières terres acadiennes
We have learned a lot that we didn't know before. But the archaeologists are quick to point out that the farm at Belleisle was only the home of one pre-expulsion Acadian family. Although the excavation has told us a great deal we should not be too quick to generalize from this one example to the whole of Acadia. In other words, the work has just begun.

I found these shards of pottery last year out on an old Acadian aboiteau - right out along the edge of Chignecto Bay (see subsequent picture).
I drove out as far as I could (with permission) and then walked out to the edge.
I looked down into the mud and saw something that caught my attention.
It was a collapsed and broken pottery bowl. Clearly hand-worked local (red) clay with a glaze on portions.
One time over 300 years ago, when the Acadians overcame the tides and marsh, a worker was having his lunch and either forgot his bowl or dropped it.
Note that this is public land, not Parks Canada, so any such finds are the property of the finder.
I am willing to donate these pieces to an appropriate historical organization upon request.