Is Colonoware an Emblem of Enslavement?

Summary

During the antebellum period the town of Manassas, Virginia, was composed of free whites, and both free and enslaved black people. In this small community material culture played a crucial role in broadcasting status amongst its anxious constituents. They lived in an atmosphere where “whiteness” connoted cleanliness, order, freedom, and privilege. An individual’s proximity to, or distance from, whiteness yielded either powerful benefits or humiliating consequences. This was a community in which colonoware pronounced status over ethnicity. Decades of archaeological investigations under the direction of the National Park Service, National Capital Region, have yielded material culture from a variety of antebellum-era domestic sites whose assemblages indicate that that the dominant ideology considered colonoware an emblem of enslavement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Beyond the Ethnicity Debate: Examining the Many Contexts of Colonoware

Keywords

Spatial Coverage