Negotiating Changing Chesapeake Identities:  Indigenous Women’s Influence on the Transformation of Seventeenth-Century English Immigrant Culture in Maryland

Summary

Documentary evidence indicates English colonists in seventeenth-century Maryland were trading for/purchasing native-made pottery for use in their daily routines.  I undertook a subtypological analysis of historic-period indigenous ceramics which demonstrated changes occurred in pottery treatments throughout the century.  While exterior attributes showed a trend towards smoother surfaces and thinner walls, echoing European-made ceramics, interior attributes maintained cultural traditions.  This tension between public and private attributes reflects societal tensions, as indigenous women, the creators of pottery vessels, struggled to negotiate cultural interactions and the transformation of identities brought on by English colonization.  At the same time, indigenous women were sharing aspects of native culture with English settlers as they traded pottery, agricultural produce, and other native-made goods for cloth and other European-made objects.  These cultural contributions helped normalize a new Chesapean lifestyle for English immigrants, blending European material culture and foodways with American ones to create a creolized seventeenth-century frontier society. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Echoes: Indigenous Communities in the Americas   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 394