The Materiality of Feasting: Pottery as an Indicator of Ritual Practice in Late Woodland Virginia

Summary

The Hatch site in Prince George County, Virginia is arguably among the most significant precolonial sites in the region. After it was excavated in the 1980s, the collection was stored away and went largely unstudied for the last thirty years. When I first began my research on this ‘orphaned’ site, I was struck by the large pit features containing evidence of ritual feasting and a wide variety of ceramic types. Adhering to the old trope that ‘pots equal people’, I initially assumed that this site was one in which different groups aggregated for rituals that increased social bonds, eventually helping them coalesce into the Algonquian groups encountered by the first English colonists. As my research progressed, I came to realize that the ceramic varieties are more indicative of the ritual practice itself than they are of different groups of people. Hatch is a site that appears to be of great ritual significance to the Late Woodland people of coastal Virginia. The artifacts found in the site’s pit features, including Abbott Zoned Incised—an elaborately decorated ceramic ware—strongly suggest this. This paper presents my research into these ritual practices and my thoughts on the significance of the ceramic types associated with them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22032