Revisiting Colonoware in Williamsburg

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Colonoware has been the subject of intense archaeological study since the type’s identification by Ivor Noel Hume at Colonial Williamsburg. The initial decades of analysis were dominated by debates centered on the cultural and ethnic origins of the ceramic’s production. A primary observation to emerge from this period, however, was the ubiquity of this ceramic at a variety of sites, from plantation quarters, to public taverns, to urban households of the plantocracy. Colonoware was a good consumed by diverse audiences. As a result, contemporary studies are increasingly focused on the role of colonoware as good produced, distributed, and consumed within local markets. In this paper we conduct a comparative analysis of colonoware assemblages from thirteen sites of consumption to explore questions concerning the variation of colonoware vessel attributes over time in one local marketplace, eighteenth century Williamsburg.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow