The Use of Ceramics in Cultural Reconstruction

Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to understand how marginalized communities navigate changing social and economic landscapes through their production, exchange, and use of everyday objects. Archaeology provides critical contributions to historical narratives by offering insights based on the tangible materials of daily experience, providing insight into the timeless and universal challenges that arise when different cultures collide. Making traditional objects such as pottery vessels is a way to develop and maintain culturally significant practices while also participating and adapting to changes within the broader economy. This project harnesses innovative comparative techniques to identify and analyze trends in archaeological big data to document changing strategies over time and space. The project team will also collaborate with descendant communities and incorporate their interests and feedback into the methods used to gather, analyze, interpret, and share the data generated from this project. The research team examines how Indigenous communities used pottery known as colonoware to contribute to, circumvent, and even disrupt traditional European markets during the 17th -19th centuries. Colonoware, a type of handmade, low-fired pottery, was an important material component of economic and cultural strategies developed in response to conditions caused by colonial systems. Using existing archaeological collections the researchers collect and analyze fine-grained data from hundreds of thousands of colonoware fragments to construct models for assessing how differences in the manufacture and marketing of these pottery vessels reflect identity, social position, and relationships among producers and users. The results improve understanding of the active roles these communities of potters and consumers played in social and economic dynamics and advance public and scholarly understandings of the historical contexts and local adaptations that shaped the lives of all people, enslaved and free, in the slave societies of the early modern world. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.