Chawan and Yunomi: Japanese Tablewares Recovered from Three Issei Communities in the American West

Summary

Japanese-manufactured ceramics from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been recovered from a variety of archaeological sites throughout Western North America, but large collections and in-depth analyses of pre-World War II assemblages are still relatively rare.  As a result, standardized formal, temporal, and functional typologies are only just emerging and site comparisons are often difficult.  This paper presents a synthesis of ceramic data from three west coast sites occupied by first-generation Japanese immigrants (Issei) between the late 1880s and early 1940s.  Using a classification scheme based on historical Japanese language terms, this analysis aims to identify commonly recovered vessels and to better understand the regional availability, distribution, and use of Japanese tablewares by Issei across the American West.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Writing Inequality, Endurance, and Transnationalism: The Archaeology of Chinese and Japanese Immigrants and their Descendants in North America   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 425