Colonoware

Colonoware, which is alternately called Colono-Indian Ware, is a type of earthenware made and used along the east coast of North America from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries.

It was first identified by the British archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume, who published his findings in 1962. He referred to it as Colono-Indian Ware, believing that it had been developed by Native Americans, who then sold it for the use of African American slaves.

Archaeological investigation

The first archaeologist to identify and categorize colonoware was Ivor Noël Hume (1927-), who had been undertaking excavations of Colonial Williamsburg throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962, he published a paper entitled "An Indian Ware of the Colonial Period" in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, which he devoted to the discussion of this particular earthenware. Believing that it was produced by Native American communities, he called it "Colono-Indian Ware" and introduced his paper as a contribution to the "study of American Indian archaeology and culture".^[1]

In subsequent decades, further excavations took place across South Carolina under the mandates of the National Historic Preservation Act and other federal statutes.^[2] Through these, much more colonoware was unearthed, leading one archaeologist working in the state, Leland Ferguson, to examine it further. In doing so, he came to the conclusion that the majority of it was produced not by Native Americans, but by African Americans.^[3]

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