Historical Archaeology

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.

From the late-19th century on, there was an increased production of colorless bottles for a wide variety of products. Producing colorless glass is not difficult if pure sand with a very low iron content is available. Iron in sand gives the glass a range of colors from light green to dark amber, depending on the amount of iron in the sand. To overcome this problem, some factories that used iron-bearing sands added manganese to their batch as a decolorizer. While this produces colorless glass, that glass will turn a light purple or amethyst color when it is exposed to sunlight. Dating of solarized glass by archaeologists has relied on information from a variety of sources, including books produced by bottle collectors. Some of this information is good and some of it, erroneous. The objective here is to provide a useful chronology of the development and use of manganese as a decolorizer and to dispel some of the myths that have crept into the literature.

This article was presented as the keynote address at The Sixth Annual Conference of The Society for Historical Archaeology meeting concurrently with the Fourth International Conference on Underwater Archaeology in St. Paul, Minnesota, January 11, 1973.

Until recently, glass bottles were generally used more than one time. This study investigates customs of bottle reuse in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular attention to the secondhand bottle business and returnable bottle systems. Effects of bottle-manufacturing machinery and reasons for the decline of bottle reuse are discussed. The implications of reuse for the analysis of bottles from archaeological sites are considered.