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In this book, R. Todd Romero traces the interaction of notions of gender, the practice of religion, and the conduct of warfare in colonial America. He shows how Native and Anglo-American ideas of manhood developed in counterpoint, in the context of Christian evangelization, colonial expansion, and recurrent armed conflict. 

For the English, the cultivation of manliness became an important aspect of missionary efforts. Conversion demanded that the English “make men” of the Indians before they could “make them Christians,” a process that involved reshaping Native masculinity according to English patriarchal ideals that the colonists themselves rarely matched. For their part, Native Americans held on to older ways of understanding the divine and defining gender even as they entered English “praying towns” and negotiated the steep demands of the missionaries. 

Evolving ideas of masculinity resonated with religious significance and shaped the meaning of warfare for Natives and colonists alike. Just as the English believed that their territorial expansion was divinely sanctioned, Indians attributed a string of victories in King Philip's War to “the Great God” and the perception that their enemies “were like women.” Trusting that war and manliness were necessarily linked, both groups engaged in ritual preparations for battle, believed deeply in the efficacy of the supernatural to affect the outcome of combat, and comprehended the meaning of war in distinctly religious ways.

An interdisciplinary excavation of colonoware as a material archive of African, Indigenous, and colonial entanglements across the early American South.

In Materializing Colonial Identities in Clay, Jon Bernard Marcoux, Corey A. H. Sattes, and contributors examine colonoware to explore the active roles that African Americans and Indigenous people played in constructing southern colonial culture and part of their shared history with Europeans.

Colonoware was most likely produced by African and Indigenous potters and used by all colonial groups for cooking, serving, and storing food. It formed the foundation of colonial foodways in many settlements across the southeastern United States. Even so, compared with other ceramics from this period, less has been understood about its production and use because of the lack of documentation. This collection of essays fills this gap with valuable, recent archaeological data from which much may be surmised about the interaction among Europeans, Indigenous, and Africans, especially within the contexts of the African and Indigenous slave trade and plantation systems.

The chapters represent the full range of colonoware research: from the beginning to the end of its production, from urban to rural contexts, and from its intraregional variation in the Lowcountry to the broad patterns of colonialism across the early American Southeast. The book summarizes current approaches in colonoware research and how these may bridge the gaps between broader colonial American studies, Indigenous studies, and African Diaspora studies.

A concluding discussion contextualizes the chapters through the perspectives of intersectionality and Black feminist theory, drawing attention to the gendered and racialized meanings embodied in colonoware, and considering how colonialism and slavery have shaped these cultural dimensions and archaeologists’ study of them.