Colonoware

More than forty years ago I sat in on an undergraduate folklore class taught by my colleague Karl Heider. As Karl was explaining to students that the coiled sweetgrass baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry bore striking resemblance to the coiled basketry of West Africa, I asked myself: 1) “Could the captured and enslaved Africans who brought coiled basketry to South Carolina also have had a role in making the hand-built, low-fired pottery we called Colono-Indian Ware?” 2) “What if most of that pottery was made by African and African-American pioneers?” and if so, 3) “How could we use it to learn about their lives and struggles of the people in bondage?” Throughout the intervening years–even as I worked intensively on other projects–I remained involved with these questions. My most recent contribution to Colonoware research is in a recently published paper, “From the Earth,” co-authored with my colleague Dr. Kelly Goldberg. (see Publications on the Main Menu of this website).