Colono ware and criollo ware pottery from Charleston, South Carolina and San Juan, Puerto Rico in comparative perspective

Abstract

The low fired earthenwares of eighteenth and nineteenth century Charleston and San Juan are associated with African Americans and display a syncretic blend of technological and stylistic traditions from West Africa, Europe and the New World. The cultural contexts of their manufacture, distribution and use relate to processes in which African American cultures developed in the New World, built upon a foundation of continuities with a shared if fragmentary African heritage, and framed with adaptations meant to cope with the oppressive conditions of poverty and racial oppression. The examination of colono and criollo ware pottery provides an opportunity to explore the complex struggle for control of African American culture as it was played out on two very different urban stages. The form, style, internal structure, and chemical composition of this pottery is examined. In South Carolina these vessels were part of a complex craft ways tradition in which many African American potters worked using a wide variety of methods. The makers of criollo wares in Puerto Rico, who may have enjoyed greater freedom than their counterparts in South Carolina, followed somewhat more standardized techniques. The elemental composition of this pottery, studied through neutron activation analysis, suggests that both of these traditions were made on many locations and were exchanged through regional trade networks. In both South Carolina and Puerto Rico there was a close association between the user of these earthenwares and African traditions in food ways, and domestic architecture. Changes in domestic technology during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as changes in European American attitudes towards African American material culture eroded the domestic context of which these vessels were a part. Although this pottery may have evoked strong associations with African traditions of hearth and home, especially for enslaved people in South Carolina, both traditions disappeared in the nineteenth century.