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Exploring the Materiality of Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Lowcountry Colonoware through Practice-Based Analysis
Abstract
Colonoware—a low-fired earthenware pottery made by enslaved African and enslaved and free Indigenous potters across the Lowcountry region of South Carolina—is a clear material consequence of colonial-identity formation. This process certainly involved African and Indigenous groups, but it also drew in English, French, and Spanish colonial powers, and the various economic, political, and social networks that bound them together. While scholars have recently offered nuanced and inclusive theoretical frameworks to help situate colonoware production within the process of colonial-identity formation, these studies thus far have lacked analytical methods that operationalize the link between potting practices and colonial-identity formation through the analysis of archaeological data. In this article, we present our attempt to forge the link between practice and data by analyzing a number of attributes that illustrate various choices potters made while constructing vessels. In particular, we are interested in comparing the methods of pottery manufacturing employed by local Indigenous potters in the “Lowcountry” region around Charleston, South Carolina, prior to European colonization to the methods used by resident potters at early colonial settlements in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
The study of colonoware—low-fired coarse earthenwares produced and used by Indigenous and African peoples and their descendants during and after the colonial period in the United States—has yet to explore the comprehensive variation in vessel form. An accurate and reliable typology is necessary for fully understanding the ways in which these vessels were manufactured and used; however, the conversation has so far primarily relied on vague umbrella categories, such as "bowl" and "jar." This article serves as a pilot study for characterizing vessel form with greater accuracy and specificity. Using a sample of nearly whole vessels from Drayton Hall’s South Flanker Well excavation, I propose a set of mutually exclusive and detailed vessel-form categories based on clear, quantitative measurements that analysts can apply on a sherd level. I then apply this typology to a multisited study sample of two precolonial coarse-earthenware assemblages and six colonial and early American colonoware assemblages, building on the attribute-based study undertaken by Marcoux, Sattes et al. (2023). This vessel-form data, examined alongside other choices made by potters of colonoware, such as treatment of clay, manufacturing technique, and surface treatment, expands the understanding of how colonoware can reflect the complex and intricate cultural identities of all peoples living under the colonial project.
Between 1707 and 1715 the St. Paul’s parsonage served as a residence for the Anglican missionaries assigned to the parish. Household provisions were stored in a brick-lined cellar below the house until it was destroyed by fire in July of 1715. This fire began the cellar’s functional transformation from storage to refuse pit. Here we use the artifacts and faunal materials recovered during archaeological excavations of the cellar and its stratigraphy, in conjunction with a few surviving letters chronicling some of the events that took place in 1715, to reconstruct the events that contributed to the formation of the archaeological deposits within the cellar.
The recent advances in microscopy and scanning techniques enabled the image analysis of archaeological objects in a high resolution. From the direct measurements in images, shapes and related parameters of the structural elements of interest can be derived. In this study, image analysis in 2D/3D is applied to archaeological ceramics, in order to obtain clues about the ceramic pastes, firing and shaping techniques. Images were acquired by the polarized light microscope, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and 3D micro X-ray computed tomography (µ-CT) and segmented using Matlab. 70 ceramic sherds excavated at Ransyrt 1 (Middle-Late Bronze Age) and Kabardinka 2 (late Bronze–early Iron Age), located in in the North Caucasian mountains, Russia, were investigated. The size distribution, circularity and sphericity of sand grains in the ceramics show site specific difference as well as variations within a site. The sphericity, surface area, volume and Euler characteristic of pores show the existence of various pyrometamorphic states between the ceramics and within a ceramic. Using alignments of pores and grains, similar pottery shaping techniques are identified for both sites. These results show that the image analysis of archaeological ceramics can provide detailed information about the prehistoric ceramic production technologies with fast data availability.
This paper highlights the agency of indigenous peoples in the manipulation, alteration, and/or definition of limits to the colonial order established in Patagonia by the end of the eighteenth century. Hence, it rests on the ideas of the ambivalence of power and intercultural relations. Interethnic relationships are explored in two case studies from the same colonizing project: “Nueva Colonia y Fuerte de Floridablanca” (San Julián Bay, Santa Cruz province) and “Fuerte San José” (Valdés peninsula, Chubut province). Social practices, material conditions of the colonial settlements, and particularly, the indigenous perceptions of the colonial posts are thoroughly considered. This information is thus intended to discuss the divergent trajectories of interethnic relationships, as well as to approach colonialism in Patagonia from the natives’ logics.
Thin-section petrography is a crucial tool for the study of archaeological ceramics, and in recent years, image analysis has emerged as a powerful quantitative enhancement of that tool. Exploratory applications of image analysis to archaeological ceramic thin sections, and related work by sedimentary geologists, have indicated its usefulness to the field. In this paper, we first present the results of experimental work testing the consistency and reproducibility of image analysis. We identify procedures for fast and reliable analysis of thin sections using laboratory-prepared ceramic specimens of simple clay-sand systems. We then show how those procedures can be slightly modified to accommodate more complex archaeological specimens. We conclude with a discussion of the role of image analysis within the overall context of thin-section petrography of ceramic materials, as one among a repertoire of techniques, adding quantitative data and increasing the usefulness of ceramic thin sections for addressing archaeological research questions.
This chapter presents an overview of the chaîne opératoire approach and recalls its relevance as a social and transmission signal. It describes the main components of the ceramic chaînes opératoires and the principles for identifying them on the archaeological material through diagnostic attributes including both surface features and microfabrics. Next, it takes a forward look at the classification of ceramic assemblages according to the chaîne opératoire approach in order to unravel the sociological complexity behind their variability. Finally, this chapter highlights the heuristic character of the chaîne opératoire approach when studying, on the synchronic axis, the techno-economic systems, and on the diachronic axis, changes in technical traditions considered as the expression of culture histories and the factors affecting them.
Pores in archaeological ceramics can form in a number of different ways, and reflect both deliberate choices and uncontrollable factors. Characterizing porosity by digital image analysis of thin sections holds a number of advantages as well as limitations. We present the results of experiments aimed at improving this method, focusing on high-resolution scans of entire thin sections. We examine the reproducibility of pore measurements by petrographic image analysis of ceramic thin sections using laboratory-prepared specimens of clay mixed with sand of known amount and size. We outline protocols for measuring Total Optical Porosity, using the Image-Pro Premier software package. We also briefly discuss use of pore size and pore shape (aspect ratio and roundness) in characterizing archaeological ceramics. While discerning reasons for observed amounts, sizes, and shapes of pores is an extremely complex problem, the quantitative analysis of ceramic porosity is one tool for characterizing a ware and comparing a product to others. The methods outlined here are applied to a case study comparing historic bricks from the Read House in New Castle, Delaware; the porosity studies indicate that different construction campaigns used bricks from different sources.
It has been stated that experimental archaeology is inherently better equipped to address technological factors than social ones. In this respect, the chaîne opératoire approach has much to recommend it for experimental archaeology. In this contribution, a case will be made for the increased interpretive power of this combination by examining a number of examples where authors have incorporated chaîne opératoire explicitly or implicitly within their investigations of a single-material type: ceramics. It is argued that, by using the chaîne opératoire to frame and contextualise experimental archaeology methodologies and interpretations, individual research programmes can produce more anthropologically relevant results.
Not long ago, our “historical” narratives concerning seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southeastern Indian communities read like colonial maps with neatly depicted “Tribal” territories and towns. Like those maps, the narratives presented a timeless “history” for groups whose identities were rooted to specific locations. This chapter traces a shift in our perspective as we have grown to appreciate the mutability and fluidity of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century colonial landscape. I explore artifact data from a number of sites to identify material traces of the social “reshuffling” that unfolded during this period—a process materialized as "improvised" diaspora communities.
The emergence of ceramic specialization in past societies is often linked to shifts in the complexity of social structures, because standardized ceramic production can reflect craft specialization and the presence of elite control. Previous work on identifying specialization relies on typological or linear metric analysis. Here we demonstrate how to investigate ceramic standardization by analyzing outlines of ceramic vessels. Outline analysis is useful because, unlike more commonly-used landmark analysis methods, it can effectively quantify shape differences for objects that lack distinctive measurement points needed for landmark analysis. We demonstrate this method using pottery from Kiwulan, a large multi-component Iron Age site (CE 1350–1850) in northeastern Taiwan. To measure ceramic specialization, we quantified pottery standardization by analyzing shape variables with reproducible geometric morphometric methods. We computed coefficients of variation (CVs) for shape coefficients obtained by elliptical Fourier analysis to test for shape standardization. We found significant differences in pottery shape and shape standardization that indicate changes in pottery production resulting from contact with mainland Han Chinese groups in northeastern Taiwan. Our case study, which includes an openly available research compendium of R code, represents an innovative application of outline-based methods in geometric morphometry to answer the anthropological questions of craft specialization.
Colonoware, a low-fired earthenware made by enslaved Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans, is a crucial source for exploring the formation and materialization of colonial identities. Yet, the origins and ethnic associations of this enigmatic colonial potting tradition have long been debated. Recent ethnographic studies of African ceramic traditions have led to our reexamination of a surface treatment lately identified on colonoware vessels in South Carolina. Our analysis focuses on colonoware sherds from two eighteenth-century sites in Charleston as well as an additional unprovenienced vessel from the Horry County Museum. Through experimental replication and cross-regional comparison, this paper argues that the application of “folded strip rouletting” on colonoware in South Carolina is related to contemporaneous decorative techniques practiced in West and northern Central Africa. The sherds analyzed in this article thus represent the first clear published example of a decorative African potting technique identified in the colonial United States.
People enslaved on the rice plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry struggled to create community and to protect the health and well-being of themselves and their families. Archaeological comparison of different forms of hand-built, low-fired pottery from the Carolina Lowcountry with practices in West and Central Africa suggests captive workers were using the pottery as necessary receptacles for preparing herbal medicines and for making charms similar to those of the Bakongo in Central Africa. African ethnographic evidence indicates that pottery is linked to conceptions of gender and power, and these ideas were likely incorporated in the ethnogenesis of the Gullah people of Carolina. Historical records and archaeological research suggest the central part of the Cooper River may have been a figurative crossroads for the enslaved people of the region. Archaeological and ethnohistorical research of enslaved people of the Carolina Lowcountry is only beginning.
Across the Northeast, Indigenous people and colonial New Englanders have fashioned myriad expressions of memory that attest to certain versions of conflicted pasts. On one hand, colonial remembrances of violence and upheaval are abundant and amply legible in local historical societies, historical markers, family heirlooms, and many other forms of memorialization. Yet this seeming abundance of memory arises from equally powerful kinds of forgetting: collective colonial amnesias that endeavor to erase, sideline, overwrite, or delegitimize other dimensions of exceedingly complex histories and conceptions of homelands. This essay adopts a fresh focus on Indigenous/colonial remembrances through the lens of materiality, considering the wider historiographical and theoretical implications of recentering tangible objects and landscapes as conduits connecting past, present, and future. Physical objects interact with both mainstream and marginalized narratives in vital ways, opening pathways for profoundly interdisciplinary, multimedia accountings of the nature and changing forms of “memory” in early America. The essay reassesses a wooden pegboard from an Anglo-American dwelling said to have survived an Indigenous attack during King Philip’s War (1675–78). Using decolonizing methodologies, it conveys dramatically more complex conceptions of the past—and of ongoing Indigenous presence and resilience—than stories devised and maintained by Euro-American antiquarians have typically relayed.
Beginning in the 1980s the concept of “creolization” began to seep its way into archaeological conversation. Leland Ferguson, an archaeologist examining the material remains from slave quarters in South Carolina, defined it as a “multicultural adjustment which entailed interaction, exchange, and creativity” (Ferguson 1992: xli). In some cases the term was used to describe a “problematic” process of language change that also allowed researchers to map human migration (McConvell 1990; Renfrew 1988; Sherratt 1988). In other cases, linguistic literature was appropriated as an explanatory model to describe the material dynamics of culture change in the context of asymmetrical social relations (see Armstrong 1985; Deagan 1983). In this chapter I explore the material effects of scholarship that took up creolization. This volume examines how a “linguistic approach to materiality can shed light on processes of meaning-making and value production” (Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume). Archaeologists employed creolization in describing culture change to make meaning of artifacts and landscape. While creolization has largely fallen out of favor in archaeological practice, its deployment prompts particular questionsworth asking. In what ways do things, and the way we talk about them as scholars, shape particular populations?We can also flip this question around: how do we populate unknown places through things, language, and their combinatory potential? The relative merits and demerits of creolization have been discussed by archaeologists and cultural and linguistic anthropologists alike. For instance, in excavating domestic contexts associated with a Bahamian slave family, Laurie Wilkie (2000) argues that creolization can be used to explain why ceramics of largely European origin were assembled following African aesthetic practices in “African ways.” Wilkie explicitly draws on a grammar-based approach, in which the lexicon of the relatively powerful is adopted by the relatively powerless, while the grammar retains many features of a parent language. Conversely, others have argued that grammar-based creolization can elide past power dynamics that shape the archaeological record (Mullins and Paynter 2000) or that such models might not be the most appropriate ones to apply to material culture (Palmié 2006). These discussions rarely enter into the thorny subject of why creolization was adopted so readily.
The Yamasee War was a watershed moment in the history of colonial South Carolina. The trade in captive Native Americans through Charles Town was much lower after the war, but did not stop. Continuities across this rupture included captives coming into possession of the colony through the same mechanisms as before the war: as diplomatic gifts, as captives taken in warfare, or as traded commodities. While the liberalized and chaotic trade in captive Native Americans was a concern for colonial officials before the Yamasee War, after the outbreak of war, planters, who controlled of the assembly, made it official policy to remove all Native American captives coming into the colony from the continent, with a few notable exceptions. The main change in how the captive trade worked came with the colonial government's moves to stand as arbiter over what captives could come into the colony and then force colonists to sell the captives to other colonies. The Native American captive trade therefore became an important site of colonial state-building in the period between 1715 and 1735.
Project Background Introduction R.L. Stephenson. Part I. The Historical Pathway at the Charles Towne Settlement 1670-1680: 1. The Historical Pathway. 2. The Methodological Pathway. 3. The Archaeological Pathway to the 1670 Fortifications. Part II. The Archaeological Pathway to the Eighteenth and Ninteenth Centuries: 4. Old Town Plantation. Part III. The Archaeological Pathway to Native Americans on Albermarle Point: 5. The Archaic, Formative and Developmental Periods. 6. A Pathway to the Climatic Period: A Ceremonial Center. 7. The Pottery Pathway at the Ceremonial Center. 8. The Material Culture Pathway to the Ceremonial Center. 9. The Pathway to Decline. Appendix. References. List of Figures. List of Tables. Index.
Markets were integral to the development of Charleston’s urban landscape, and the interaction between African Americans and market spaces shaped Charleston. The archaeology of the South Carolina low country highlights African Americans’ role in Charleston’s market economy and the significance of this economy in forging an African American cultural identity, the Gullah. The linkage between markets and African American space in Charleston persists, and these connections indicate that markets and the market economy have deep-seated meanings to the Gullah.
The first part of this work deals with detailed observations obtained during four field expeditions (1967-1971) in Pakistan, for pottery making of unglazed ware in 13 areas and glazed ware in 5 major centers. For each center a brief outline of the area is given, followed by an outline of the potter's craft under the following guidelines: tools and equipment, materials gathering and preparation, forming and finishing techniques, decoration (including slips and pigments), glazing, kilns and firing, and types of ware. Most of the common pottery-making techniques in Pakistan are included although fieldwork was primarily in the Northwest Frontier Province and Panjab. Pottery-related crafts such as brickmaking and tanur (bread oven) making are briefly discussed. In the second part of this work detailed relationships between pottery-making techniques, outlined in the first section, are developed under the headings of tools and equipment, materials, forming and finishing techniques, slips, pigments and colorants, glazes, and kilns and firing. Technical studies include mineralogy studies of clays and tempering materials, particle size distribution studies of nonplastic tempering materials, and electron microprobe analyses of fired glazes. The monograph provides essential data for use in comparative studies of archeological ceramics from Pakistan, as well as a detailed record of the rapidly disappearing pottery crafts of that country, including five appendixes and a glossary.
Colono-Indian ceramics occur with variable frequency in Colonial sites from Virginia to Florida. These ceramics have traditionally been viewed as having been manufactured by local Indian groups for trade with European settlers. Recently, however, it has been suggested that many, if not most, of these ceramics were manufactured by African slaves?a documented practice on Barbados during the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite these questions concerning who was responsible for the manufacture of Colono-Indian ceramics, questions concerning the diachronic and synchronic function of these ceramics are largely unresolved. This paper focuses largely on these questions of general function, using material from an 18th and 19th century rice plantation in coastal South Carolina as the primary data base. An analysis of the occurrence of Colono-Indian ceramics at Limerick Plantation reveals that this ware group functioned as an integral part of the kitchen assemblage. Furthermore, an analysis of the occurrence of these ceramics at Limerick through time suggests that they are significantly more frequent during the Colonial period than during the Antebellum period. This temporal distribution has been suggested to be a result of economic stress during the Colonial period, which resulted in the selection of inexpensive Colono-Indian wares over the more expensive European wares.
In the colonial era, Charleston, South Carolina, was the largest city in the American South. From 1700 to 1775 its growth rate was exceeded in the New World only by that of Philadelphia. The first comprehensive study of this crucial colonial center, Building Charleston charts the rise of one of early America's great cities, revealing its importance to the evolution of both South Carolina and the British Atlantic world during the eighteenth century.In many of the southern colonies, plantation agriculture was the sole source of prosperity, shaping the destiny of nearly all inhabitants, both free and enslaved. The insistence of South Carolina's founders on the creation of towns, however, meant that this colony, unlike its counterparts, would also be shaped by the imperatives of urban society. In this respect, South Carolina followed developments in the rest of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, where towns were growing rapidly in size and influence.At the vanguard of change, burgeoning urban spaces across the British Atlantic ushered in industrial development, consumerism, social restructuring, and a new era in political life. Charleston proved no less an engine of change for the colonial Low Country, promoting early industrialization, forging an ambitious middle class, a consumer society, and a vigorous political scene.Bringing these previously neglected aspects of early South Carolinian society to our attention, Emma Hart challenges the popular image of the prerevolutionary South as a society completely shaped by staple agriculture. Moreover, Building Charleston places the colonial American town, for the first time, at the very heart of a transatlantic process of urban development. © 2010 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
Archaeologists who study Indigenous cultures in the context of European colonialism are frequently caught in a conundrum of temporal scale. How do we represent, render, and interpret Indigenous practices and peoples in ways that not only respect the complexities of the colonial world and their actions therein but also situate their lives in the context of their own unique short- and long-term cultural histories? Capturing this duality has not been easy. Part of the problem is that archaeologists have not fully heeded the call by Lightfoot (1995) to conduct truly multiscalar, diachronic studies of colonialism and Indigenous responses to its many forms. Part of it also relates to the ways that archaeological concepts, terms, and methods are not yet decolonized and not yet attuned to the ways that people, past and present, relate to their own histories. On the one hand, some archaeologists (and other historical scholars) have interpreted colonial encounters and settlements as the decisive moment in Indigenous histories, a moment that either halts those histories or redirects them (see Hart et al., this volume). Indigenous people who pass through that pivotal gateway are often seen as significantly altered, as an amalgamation of different cultures, as disconnected from their traditions, as completely novel cultural forms, or, worse, as inauthentic. This might be called the short purée-the mixing and mashing of Indigenous and colonial cultures in relatively short order. The short purée takes an extreme form with the work of demographic nihilists, but other variants can be found in those approaches that privilege the novel or creative experience of colonialism-a kind of "free play" of symbols and things-at the expense of the situated knowledges and experiences of Indigenous social actors. It also has a deep legacy in the acculturation approaches of the mid-twentieth century. On the other hand, some archaeologists and a few historical anthropologists opt to downplay the impact of colonialism, or at least recontextualize it, in light of long-term Indigenous histories that span centuries, if not millennia, before the arrival of European colonists. Regardless of its various theoretical origins, I will refer to this as an orientation to the longue durée. This reorientation grants primacy to Indigenous agency, tradition, and cultural structures that both predate and rival those of colonists and settlers, and it permits a view of Indigenous action as contributing, in part, to the direction of history. Such a view sometimes draws either metaphorically or conceptually on the Annales school of history. Other takes can be seen in the famous work of Marshall Sahlins in the Pacific (Sahlins 1981, 1985) or in newer work emphasizing Indigenous myths and metaphors (Vitelli 2011). Both perspectives have value, but they also have their limitations in the study of Indigenous histories across the "great divide" of so-called prehistorichistoric or precontact-postcontact periods (see Scheiber and Mitchell 2010). My objective in this chapter is to outline the positions and their problems and to propose a reorientation to the scale of memory and practice (see Stahl, this volume) as a way of potentially resolving some of the issues raised by these heuristically polar opposites. This resolution arises from, and can contribute to, decolonizing collaborative approaches to archaeology and history. In fact, my own thinking about this derives from the intersection of postcolonial theory, social theories of memory, archaeological data, and my long-term community partnership with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation of southeastern Connecticut to study their past. I recount some of the interpretations and context of that research here to make these conceptual points.
African Americans were integral to the stoneware-manufacturing district that developed around Edgefield, South Carolina. Enslaved African Americans worked as potters at several of the Edgefield shops, and the most renowned potter of the district was an enslaved African American named Dave, who incorporated poetic verse onto some of the pottery he made, as well as other marks including an X and slashes. A cross mark was also associated with two of the potteries in the district where Dave had once worked: the Rev. John Landrum Pottery, and the subsequent operation of this pottery by Rev. Landrum's son, Benjamin Franklin Landrum. This cross-in-circle mark, known as the Landrum cross, resembles the African Bakongo cosmogram dikenga. The Landrum cross, as well as Dave's use of the X and slashes, may be representations of African symbols brought to the New World and found archaeologically in other settings and contexts. This paper looks at the African American presence in Edgefield, Landrum crosses, and Dave's use of the cross mark, to examine the meaning of these marks and their potential expression of African American identity.
The relationship between forming techniques and orientation of the components of ceramic materials in the context of pottery technology has long been recognized and used for identification of the techniques employed to create archaeological ceramics. The alignment of inclusions is usually characterized by qualitative categories or ordinal scales. This paper evaluates the potential of quantitative orientation analysis for identification of pottery-forming techniques. A collection of experimental pottery formed using five forming techniques and combined techniques was analysed. The forming techniques were characterized by the intervals of the mean direction and the circular standard deviations of the orientation of the major axes of the ellipses equivalent to the objects representing random sections of inclusions and voids. The most informative criteria for the identification of pottery techniques are the circular standard deviation of the inclusion/void orientations in the core area of the vessel wall in a perpendicular thin section and the mean direction in a tangential section.
Hybridity as an interpretive construct in the archaeology of colonialism has encountered many pitfalls, due largely to the way it has been set adrift from clear theoretical anchors and has been applied inconsistently to things, practices, processes, and even people. One of the telltale signs of its problematic nature is the ease with which archaeologists claim to identify the origin and existence of hybridity but the difficulty faced if asked when and how such hybridity actually ends, if it does. In that context, this paper offers a potential requiem for hybridity. If we need not go that far, archaeologists at least need to rein in the “Frankenstein” version of hybridity that permeates archaeology and occludes its variable and problematic origins, acknowledge the dangers of accentuating or even celebrating “purées,” and beware of the creation of cultural “mules” in analytical classifications and interpretations.
This Perspective presents an overview of the archaeology of pluralistic colonies (approximately late 1500s-1800s) in North America. It complements the other special feature papers in this issue on ancient societies in Mesoamerica, the Near East, the Armenian Highlands, Peru, and China by presenting another body of literature for examining the dynamics of change in multiethnic societies from a different time and place. In synthesizing archaeological investigations of mercantile, plantation, and missionary colonies, this Perspective shows how this research is relevant to the study of pluralism in both historic and ancient societies in three ways. (i) It enhances our understanding of interethnic relationships that took place in complex societies with imposing political hierarchies and labor structures. (ii) It helps us to refine the methods used by archaeologists to define and analyze multiethnic communities that were spatially delimited by ethnic neighborhoods. Finally, (iii) it presents more than a half century of experimentation with various models (e.g., acculturation, creolization, ethnogenesis, and hybridity) that have been used to study the dynamics of culture change in multiethnic societies.
Interpretations of ceramic evidence from the Initial Middle Missouri (IMM) complex of the Northern Plains have suggested a technologically simple and homogenous ceramic production industry. Previously unused techniques for identifying and evaluating macroscopic ceramic production evidence allow for new interpretations of ceramic materials. Our study employs a chaîne opératoire approach to ceramics from three IMM sites in South Dakota: Mitchell (39DV2), Dodd (39ST30), and Breeden (39ST16). Macroscopic production traces identified on the ceramics from these sites include paddle-and-anvil impressions, coil seams, surface smoothing marks and plastic additions. Eleven distinct chaînes opératoires are identified. These new data allow for a broadened interpretation of social and cultural complexity at IMM sites, and provide the basis for further studies investigating technological innovation, cultural interaction, and social complexity on the Plains.
What has frequently been termed "contact-period" archaeology has assumed a prominent role in North American archaeology in the last two decades. This article examines the conceptual foundation of archaeological "culture contact" studies by sharpening the terminological and interpretive distinction between "contact" and "colonialism." The conflation of these two terms, and thereby realms of historical experience, has proven detrimental to archaeologists ' attempts to understand indigenous and colonial histories. In light of this predicament, the article tackles three problems with treating colonialism as culture contact: (1) emphasizing short-term encounters rather than long-term entanglements, which ignores the process and heterogeneous forms of colonialism and the multifaceted ways that indigenous people experienced them; (2) down-playing the severity of interaction and the radically different levels of political power, which does little to reveal how Native people negotiated complex social terrain but does much to distance "contact" studies from what should be a related research focus in the archaeology of African enslavement and diaspora; and (3) privileging predefined cultural traits over creative or creolized cultural products, which loses sight of the ways that social agents lived their daily lives and that material culture can reveal, as much as hide, the subtleties of cultural change and continuity.