Linda Kennedy

Recognizing Individual Potters in Nineteenth-Century Colonoware

The individual craftsperson is often lost in the broad patterns of normative analysis. Recent South Carolina research has attempted to refocus on the individual and how that individual interacts within and between communities. The technological and stylistic analysis of slave-made pottery from three contemporaneous, 19th-century slave settlements in Beaufort County, South Carolina, was aimed at recognizing individual potters. Suspected potter-level idiosyncracies allowed for the modeling of five potters, or one to two potters per community. The results also suggest that no ceramic exchange occurred between the slave rows, even though they were all in proximity and two were elements of a single plantation. The findings have implications for understanding the use context of late Colonoware, and for delineating potter-topotter variation within the well-entrenched tradition.