This volume is a significant contribution to the growing field of colonoware studies, and its chapters “reflect the current directions of colonoware research in the Lowcountry, Chesapeake, and wider field of low-fired earthenware studies” (p. 14). Contributors consider chronological change in regional styles and production methods through the lenses of European colonialism and African and Indigenous diaspora influences. Authors apply the term colonoware to “all locally hand-built low-fired earthenware pottery in colonial-era contexts, regardless of the origin of production” (p. 23). Part I focuses on how colonowares can be tangible indicators of social relationships, whereas Part II examines economic relationships, primarily in the Carolina Lowcountry.
All the contributors provide insightful overviews of the history of colonoware studies, summarize current research approaches and trends, and propose promising future directions for inquiry. They present how changes in the style, variety, and diversity of wares mirror changes experienced by communities, urban and rural alike, including shifts in market availability, the impact of disease and drought on populations, and variable access to clay resources. The role of women as potters and crucial participants in distribution networks is discussed throughout. Several authors encourage reanalysis of archival and curated collections using current historical and archival data frameworks, while interpreting them through contemporary understandings of cultural interaction, economy, and colonialism. Archaeologists and analysts are also urged to reflect critically on their own biases and methods.
A recurring theme is that colonowares are much more than everyday, utilitarian vessels: they are a window into how people shaped and responded to their world. These handmade pots, made under the pressures of enslavement and exclusion, reflect lived experiences, cultural ties, and quiet forms of resistance. The communities were not passive: they made meaning through their craft, even while facing persistent limitations.
Most chapters adopt a multisite perspective, inviting us to consider interactions, resource access, and power dynamics across geographies and time. They identify relations, interactions, and movements of objects and ideas in ways that transcend conventional archaeological divisions of “prehistoric” (“protohistoric” Indigenous) and “historic” (non-Indigenous) peoples. Five chapters focus on Indigenous production and distribution of colonoware, and three chapters focus on African diaspora contexts. Chapters discuss case studies from Charleston and nearby areas (chapter 5 by Martha A. Zierden and coauthors and chapter 8 by Corey A. H. Sattes), the Rappahannock drainage of Virginia (chapter 3 by Julia A. King and coauthors), the Creek communities (talwas) of central Alabama (chapter 2 by Craig T. Sheldon Jr.), the Catawba of South Carolina (chapter 7 by David J. Cranford), and a broad regional comparison encompassing Cherokees, Upper and Lower Creeks, and Catawbas of the 1600s and 1700s (chapter 1 by Jon Bernard Marcoux and Sattes). In chapter 6, J. W. Joseph uses evidence from wares created by African American artisan potters—recovered from submerged contexts (sunken canoes) that were likely being transported to markets—to suggest possible links between colonoware and Edgefield stoneware from Piedmont South Carolina. In chapter 4, Andrew Agha reexamines the collection of colonoware from the Charles Towne Landing site in South Carolina through the lens of property theory: this provides nuance to our understandings of who lived and worked here (including enslaved Africans and white indentured servants and women) and how their labor was crucial in the economic and cultural development of the late seventeenth-century Carolina colony.
Finally, Jodi Barnes reviews each chapter using intersectionality and Black feminist theory as tools to understand social, political, and daily lives. She calls on archaeologists to reflect on their own roles in continuing current structures of categorization and analysis and to strive to include the works of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized scholars. She challenges us to make archaeology relevant to broader audiences, which I support. We have an obligation to communicate research findings to local communities, especially to descendants.
The legacy of enslavement is still present today; racialized patterns of access to property, capital, education, markets, and ownership persist. Material culture and informal economies are still spaces where identity, resistance, and adaptation play out on both large and small scales. Such parallels demonstrate the persistent capacity to navigate and respond to structural constraints through creativity and resilience.
Colonowares are not confined to the eastern United States: some, in European forms, have also been recovered from the colonial-era Gulf South and Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV). This volume was developed to focus on the Chesapeake and Carolina Lowcountry, but I call on archaeologists to undertake similar efforts to study colonowares in the LMV, the Gulf South, and the Caribbean.
