Ceramics in the Garden

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Serving as connections between the natural and human-built world, garden landscapes speak loudly to the social purposes and the intentionality of their creators. Traditional analysis of colonial era gardens in the Chesapeake have focused on gardens as one means by which members of the elite expressed their social power over the landscape and other members of society. Unsurprisingly, much of the evidence for these projects focuses on the materiality of gardens as revealed through the immobile attributes of these spaces using interpreted archaeological features or documentary evidence of garden layout. However, garden landscapes of this time also included mobile material culture in the form of garden ceramics. Recent excavations at the Custis Square site in Williamsburg, Virginia offer a unique opportunity to begin exploration of the role and visual aesthetics of mobile material culture in the garden.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow