A River of Doubt: Marked Colonoware, Underwater Sampling, and Questions of Inference

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that marked Colonoware bowl fragments recovered from rivers in coastal South Carolina do not support an inference that African Americans engaged in waterside spiritual ceremonies in those locations during the eighteenth century.At the Society for Historical Archaeology meetings in January 2007, I heard several scholars of African American archaeology repeating the fallacy that Leland Ferguson (1999) had conclusively demonstrated the association of marked Colonoware bowls with a riverside ritual in eighteenth-century South Carolina.Ferguson (1999) raised the intriguing proposition that a small sample of such artifacts could have been associated with such riverside ceremonies, and that those activities could have entailed developing beliefs that related to the Bakongo culture of West Central Africa.However, he did not prove this, and historical archaeologists should refrain from characterizing his proposal as a proven conclusion.This essay presents an updated analysis of related issues in sampling and inferences of significance that I raised in an earlier paper at the 2003 Southeastern Archaeological Conference (Espenshade 2003).Examples of over-reaching, definitive statements from which archaologists should refrain in this debate include: "the statistical association of the vessels with rivers" (DeCorse 1999:140); "the fact that most of these vessels were recovered from underwater contexts, a finding that suggests bowls were purposefully placed in the water as part of rituals" (Singleton 1999:11); "Most of the marked colonoware bowls were found in the waters of rivers and streams, confirming their roles in rituals involving the waters that separate the living from the dead" (diZerega Wall 2000); and "all these factors point to repeated and intentional practice --again, most likely ritualistic" (Delgado De Torres 2006:7).There are five problems with the waterside ritual argument: 1.The argument is based overwhelmingly on materials from sports divers.2. The argument ignores that sports divers collect a whole range of domestic refuse from the rivers, not just marked bowls.3. The argument is overly broad in considering any crossed line design similar to a cosmogram.