The Significance of Hotel Ware Ceramics in the Twentieth Century

Summary

Hotel Ware is a highly durable, vitrified ceramic tableware introduced by American potters in the late nineteenth century. The ware became tremendously popular in the first half of the twentieth century, with production peaks in the late 1920s and again in the late 1940s. Hotel Ware was prized for its toughness and cost-effectiveness, and was the ware of choice in nearly every commercial and institutional setting of that period. Excavations at trash middens at the site of Riding Mountain Prison Camp, an institution that that held 500 German Wehrmacht prisoners in Canada during the Second World War, produced a large collection of the various things discarded during the camp’s short two years of occupation. Hotel Ware ceramics recovered from those excavations are the basis for this case study that demonstrates how the provisioning of ceramics by institutions is a calculated project that works on both pragmatic and ideological levels. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015   •
• Applied Contemporary Archaeology

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 26