Making Pottery, Constructing Community and Engaging the Market: Colonoware Production on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation

Summary

Colonoware is an important object of the colonial era that continues to invoke debate surrounding the ethnic identity of its makers. However, attempts to tie an “exact” ethnicity to colonoware production dismiss the deep structure of social processes tied to these objects created, used, and sold by both enslaved African American and Indigenous communities. This paper combines archaeological, oral history and documentary research conducted on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation located in tidewater Virginia, to contextualize colonoware as an important feature of Pamunkey life during the nineteenth century. Importantly, in viewing colonoware through the lens of Pamunkey material culture, I argue the object of pottery, and the process of producing it, concretized the central role landscape played in structuring the community’s appropriation of the region’s market economy. Specifically I explore Pamunkey colonoware production in reference to: 1) The Pamunkeys’ existing systems of knowledge surrounding use of the Reservation landscape; 2) The community’s innovative appropriation of the region’s market economy through the employment of traditional subsistence practices; 3) Contemporary tribal members’ perspectives and reflections on their past that I argue are integral to examining the role pottery making played, and continues to play in Pamunkey engagement with the market economy.

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