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Throughout the colonial period, Charles Town was the hub for communities and plantations stretching across the Lowcountry and deep into the backcountry of the Carolina colony. Deerskins, naval stores, and agricultural produce ®owed into the city for shipment to Europe, the Caribbean, and the northern colonies; goods and immigrants ®owed into the city for transport to Lowcountry and backcountry towns and plantations. As noted in the introduction to this volume, the colonial city was a multiethnic entrepôt, and visitors to the town would comment on its diversity of inhabitants and appearance. By the end of the eighteenth century the city’s image had changed to a more structured and homogeneous appearance , and city residents de¤ned themselves as Charlestonians, not colonists. Because goods and people passed through Charles Town on a routine basis, and because Charles Town was both the economic and social center of the region, it follows that changes in the way Charlestonians identi¤ed themselves and in the ways they used material things to express their identity would have become known among the Lowcountry and backcountry towns and plantations and would have in®uenced change there as well. This chapter looks at the changes in ceramics, architecture, and landscape in the city from circa 1720 to circa 1800 to understand how these material expressions of Charles Town changed and what these changes tell us about the ways the colonists identi¤ed themselves. These changes are examined through the archaeological analysis of a single site, the Charleston Judicial Center site, 38CH1708. Located on Broad Street between King Street and Courthouse Square, this site is the location of a new County Judicial Center. Archaeological study of the site was sponsored by the Charleston County Department of Capital Projects (Joseph and Hamby 1998). Like colonial Charles Town in general, the residents of the site were ethnically diverse, including English, Africans, French Huguenots, Dutch, 14 From Colonist to Charlestonian: The Crafting of Identity in a Colonial Southern City J. W. Joseph and Italians. This chapter treats them as a whole, looking at broad-scale changes in material culture. The site excavation used machine stripping to clear large surfaces before cultural features were mapped and excavated. More than seven hundred features were recorded at the Judicial Center site and, of these, 140 were excavated. Of the excavated features, two-thirds date to the colonial era. These features and their artifacts provide a look at the changes in material culture that occurred in the colonial city. Material Culture Cultural diversity is clearly expressed in the material assemblage of the site, with artifacts originating from a number of locations. French preserve jars and wine bottles, German Westerwald stoneware, Iberian storage jars, delft from Holland and England, faience from France, Chinese porcelain, and Native American and African American colonowares contributed to a cultural mosaic on every table in town. Yet this cultural diversity was a product of the places things were made as much as the people who were using them. In certain instances, artifacts are more clearly indicators of ethnicity, such as in the case of an excavated Dutch kookpot or gortpan, a redware cooking vessel of traditional Dutch form apparently manufactured in the Americas. But such ethnic markers are rare. Looking at broader patterns we begin to see the ways in which the material culture of Charles Town changed and we can begin to evaluate the meaning of these changes. For the purposes of this chapter I have focused on the vessels identi¤ed from ten features spanning the period from circa 1720 to circa 1796. Minimum vessel counts were calculated for each of these features by ceramic type, and within type individual vessels were recognized by attributes such as vessel form, rim treatment, and decoration. Within the collection are more than forty-two types of ceramic. The most common type in the entire collection is underglazed Chinese porcelain, which accounts for seventy-eight of the 574 total vessels. Slipware is the next most common , accounting for sixty-four vessels. If polychrome, blue and white, and plain delft are combined, then delft as a type accounts for ¤fty-one vessels . Colonoware is fourth on the list, with thirty-seven colonoware vessels identi¤ed in the collection. This recipe—porcelain, slipware, delft, and colonoware—is the signature of features predating the 1770s, as the majority of the colonoware (97 percent), slipware (88 percent), and delft vessels (78 percent) are from this period. Only porcelain spans this break, with forty-¤ve of the porcelain...

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