Constructed ca. 1665-1675 and made famous by its capture during Bacon’s Rebellion, “Bacon’s Castle” is a plantation house located in Surry, a small, rural county just south across the James River from the “Historic Triangle” of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. Geographical and historical differences set the near-southside area apart, but it remains underrepresented in regional studies, making revisiting legacy collections from sites like Bacon’s Castle especially important. Reassessment of ceramics from ca. pre-1750s refuse deposits revealed that, apart from imported shipping/storage containers, most utilitarian coarsewares were domestic. Before ca. 1710, extremely local colonial products predominated (e.g., “Lawnes Creek ware,” produced < 5km from Bacon’s Castle), before giving way to colonoware and other domestic wares from farther afield. Further comparative research, especially on under-studied, highly local wares, and assemblages from rural or “peripheral” sites, will help contextualize both while shedding light on relations of production, exchange, and consumption at subregional scales.

Possibly the most commonly found ceramic material on 18th century domestic sites, Coarse Earthenware vessels varied greatly and were used for everything from storage to food preparation and consumption. In 2015-2019 archaeologists at George Washington’s Mount Vernon excavated a workyard just south of the Mansion’s main kitchen, where butchering and other food preparation and processing likely took place. They recovered a rich assemblage of coarse earthenware fragments. This project focuses on these coarse earthenwares and explores the implications of the presence of different varieties and vessel forms as well as the distribution of these fragments across the workyard in order to illuminate more about food preparation and related activities conducted by the enslaved Africans and African-Americans who worked in and around the kitchen preparing food for the Washingtons and the plantation.

The Starbuck farmstead (12He192) in Hendricks County, Indiana, offers a case study in how Quaker religious principles were maintained and adapted in a frontier context. Archaeological and geophysical investigations documented a rural household engaged in small-scale redware production alongside agriculture. Material remains reflect selective engagement with commercial markets and a prioritization of utility over aesthetics. Two groundhog-style kilns—more commonly associated with the southeastern United States—suggest transmission of ceramic knowledge across migration routes. The Starbuck family’s ancestry reflects broader Quaker movement from the Northeast to the Carolinas and eventually the Midwest, carrying religious ideals and craft traditions. The ceramic assemblage was dominated by functional forms, with no evidence for distribution beyond the household. These findings suggest the Starbucks negotiated limited market participation, using localized production to meet material needs while adhering to religious values. The site illustrates how identity, migration, and subsistence strategies intersected in nineteenth-century Quaker material life.

Stantec conducted Phase I–III archaeological investigations at the Tichenor-Mulford Farmstead (33WA1084) in Warren County, Ohio, ahead of residential development. The site, occupied from the early 19th through early 20th centuries, preserves intact deposits associated with the Tichenor family, early settlers whose household material practices suggest a deliberate distancing from the nearby Union Village Shaker community. Phase II investigations—including shovel testing, electrical resistivity survey, and test unit excavation—identified features warranting data recovery. Phase III work employed terrestrial and drone-based photogrammetry, unit excavation, and mechanical stripping to document domestic features, architectural debris, and evidence of household-scale redware use and disposal. Artifact and feature patterning suggest selective engagement with regional markets, resistance to Shaker norms, and evolving practices of rural waste management. These data inform regional research on religious tension and material expression, household organization, and rural lifeways in early 19th-century southwestern Ohio.

In 2022, William Asadorian, former Queensboro Archivist donated his archaeological collections to Monmouth University as a study resource for students and faculty. Included in the collection was a large assemblage of artifacts from the Solomon Day Pottery in Norwalk Connecticut. These artifacts include kiln furniture, kiln bricks, wasters, and most significantly, ceramic doorknobs and buttons produced by the firm. Recovered by Asadorian during the demolition of the Norwalk Compressor Works, they provide a glimpse of early 19^th century Yankee ingenuity in which new manufacturing techniques and materials, in this case ceramics, were employed in the manufacture of fashionable and colorful buttons.

Tonalá Bruñida, also known as Guadalajara Polychrome, is a Mexican ceramic ware whose production has remained largely consistent from the late colonial period to today. As part of Spain’s colonial maritime trade network, Tonalá Bruñida was valued as a luxury commodity among the upper socioeconomic classes of Spain. Using a combination of archaeological and ethnographic methodologies, this project investigates the nutritional and cultural values associated with the intersection of Tonalá Bruñida as an element of Spanish colonial material culture and as an object of geophagy, or “earth-eating.” This constitutes a novel anthropological study on the ingestion of a finished ceramic product. Given that Tonalá Bruñida geophagy has carried stigma from the colonial period through to modern day, this project aims to more fully contextualize the colonial period geophagic consumption of Tonalá Bruñida by upper class Spanish women as it relates to the continuation of this practice in modern Mexico.