Drayton Hall, twelve miles northwest of Charleston, SC, is best known for its 18th century surviving example of Palladian architecture, despite the history of British occupation of the property dating to 1673. As a Restoration-period colony the development of the plantation system and influx of both colonists from other European dominions and newcomers to the Americas resulted in a different trajectory of growth in the Carolina Proprietorship than previous English endeavors. Through the historical narrative of what is known of the five pre-Drayton owners of plantation (1673 – 1738), it is known that all owned Native American slaves, many of whom were brought into the colony through transportation from New England and Virginia. When this is considered with the archaeological record of features dating to the 17th century, the artifacts suggest hybridization in vessel forms brought from other regions that relate to the practice of enslavement following warfare and territorial expansion.

Many long-standing questions in historical archaeology involve the production, distribution, preparation, consumption, and disposal of food. Foodways extend beyond the ingredients themselves to their cultural, economic, and environmental contexts. We consider this broader context in a case study of the production and distribution of cattle products between and within rural and urban centers in the colonial Chesapeake, the Carolina Lowcountry, and elsewhere. We conclude that animal economies in both regions were complex systems reflecting local environmental conditions, cash crop production, labor systems, regional traditions, and market opportunities. In the Chesapeake Bay cattle were managed within an economy specializing in tobacco production. The Carolina economy focused on cattle and rice production using an enslaved labor force working on the task system. This comparison expands traditional foodway studies by linking animal economies in emerging urban centers to their hinterlands and to global narratives of colonization and environmental history.

Historians of the 17th-century Chesapeake have emphasized the importance of tobacco for export and maize for domestic consumption, arguing that wheat became an economically important crop after about 1720. Results from a regional analysis of paleoethnobotanical samples dating from 1630 to 1725 reveal that Eurasian grains began to appear with some consistency in Virginia’s Northern Neck and Maryland after about 1660. Documentary evidence indicates that planters and tenants grew small grains in this subregion during the second half of the 17th century. After 1700, the increased presence of wheat coincides with an increase in beans, bottle gourds and squash, crops likely associated with kitchen gardens, with the former possibly used to improve the fertility of fields. In this paper, we review the evidence and explore this agricultural shift and its implications for social landscapes and British foodways. We call for an archaeologically grounded paleoethnobotanical approach for other British colonial settings.

Tobacco pipes are nearly ubiquitous on English colonial sites, and while most of these were made with imported white ball clay, some of them are clearly different. Made with local clays using a diverse array of technological, manufacturing, and decorative techniques, these pipes became a focus of debate among archaeologists working in the Chesapeake region, but they have also been found in Canada, New England, and parts of the American Southeast. In New England specifically, mold-made red clay pipes often appear at centers of commercial trade. In this paper, I will analyze the documentary materials associated with three such sites: Feature 43/the James Garrett cellar (Charlestown), Colonial Pemaquid (Maine), and the Clarke and Lake site (Maine). Building off previous research, I will trace the trade networks associated with these sites within and beyond New England to better understand who may have been using these pipes and why.

For over a decade, archaeologists collaborating with the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) have conducted fine-grained analysis of colonoware ceramics from 24 sites in Virginia and South Carolina, investigating how these ceramics were made, marketed, and used. We found significant variation in vessel abundance and sherd attributes, such as thickness, paste inclusion type and density, surface treatments, and presence of residue among these occupations of the 17th-19th centuries. Our newest study expands on earlier work and tests whether these trends persist, adding three archaeological assemblages from South Carolina and an assemblage from Virginia. We re-evaluate our working hypothesis that inter-regional attribute variation is a result of functional differences in the ways communities used colonoware. We show that interweaving extant data from DAACS with new datasets allows us to better understand how colonoware was incorporated into culinary activities at different spatial and temporal scales in early modern North America.

Seventeenth-century trading posts in eastern North America were both places and symbols of settler expansion, spaces where violent encounters along with the exchange of goods co-existed as Europe pressed its case into the interior. In this paper, I compare assemblages recovered from two late 17th-century trading posts, including Portobago in Virginia and St. Giles Kussoe in Carolina, to tease out similarities and differences in the material conditions of these settlements. Both sites, for example, yielded higher proportions of Native-made ceramics than plantation settlements. The Native ceramics from Portobago, however, are all locally produced while a significant amount of non-local Native ceramics from St. Giles indicates foreign delegations to the settlement. These and other material differences reflect the varied strategies by which settlers, in search of animal skins, slaves, and land, manipulated Indigenous practices of exchange and warfare, and by which Indigenous leaders used Anglo-Native exchange to forge political alliances.

“Jesuit” rings are unset finger rings mass-produced in France from the 16th to 18th centuries with Christian iconography stamped or etched into the ring face. In North America, archaeologists have primarily recovered these artifacts from sites throughout New France. Due to the close association of these objects with Indigenous sites and the Jesuit missionaries of New France, initial interpretations of these rings outside of the colony include discussions of the religious conversion of Indigenous communities. However, analysis of Jesuit rings recovered from the New France, Chesapeake, New England, and Pennsylvania colonies suggest more secularized interpretations are required. This paper seeks to reanalyze Jesuit rings recovered outside New France to discuss how these artifacts are proxies for the complex and variable political economies that developed from preexisting and new interregional relationships throughout the Eastern Woodlands.

Written accounts of Catawba potters indicate they were engaged in a thriving ceramic trade as early as the 1770s across the Carolina Piedmont and Lowcountry. Since the 1990s, the ceramic type “River Burnished” has been used in the Lowcountry to refer to pottery that was presumably produced by Catawba potters. This link has yet to be tested with archaeological evidence. In this paper, we explore Catawba production and exchange of colonoware in the Lowcountry by comparing assemblages of Catawba-made pottery from their late 18th and early 19th century Piedmont villages with suspected Catawba-made pottery from contemporaneous Lowcountry contexts. We focus on empirical comparison of the choices potters made in producing vessels, including paste composition, vessel form, and surface treatment. By testing the degree of similarity across contexts, this preliminary research will help us better understand the variation and distribution of early Catawba trade pottery.