Inside the Pot House: Diaspora, Identity, and Locale in Barbadian Ceramics Jonathan Finch University of York A debate about the role of ceramics in communicating social identities among enslaved Africans has been a primary element of archaeological investigations of African diasporas. Early studies sought to identify distinct production techniques and vessel forms among low-fired earthenwares that were made on and traded between plantations and relate those to particular pottery types produced in regions of Africa impacted by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A theoretical shift occasioned by contextual archaeologies refocuses attention on how artifacts and spaces were used by enslaved workers to forge identities through the social and labor relationships that surrounded them. This article investigates the production of earthenware on Barbados during the eighteenth century, where production techniques and vessel forms did not conform to early archaeological models of Africanisms and cultural markers. This study employs documentary evidence to explore the locales within which pottery was produced on a group of related plantations. Drawing on work by Silliman and Gosselain, this article argues that a combination of ethnic and demographic evidence from particular pottery production locations can illuminate how new African diaspora social identities were negotiated and communicated within and between enslaved communities during the working tasks of the plantations. keywords colonialism, ceramics, Caribbean, identity, potters Archaeology has proven to be an essential tool in understanding the human condition under the oppressive regime of colonialism, and ceramics studies have long been central to that endeavor. A debate about the role of ceramics in the creation and communication of social identities among Africans forcibly transported to the Americas via the Middle Passage over the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries has been a significant element within the archaeology of the African diaspora for over forty years. The realization that low-fired earthenwares were made by, and traded between, the enslaved, as well as Native Americans, led early studies to seek distinct production techniques and vessel journal of african diaspora archaeology & heritage, Vol. 2 No. 2, November, 2013, 115–130 ß W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/2161944113Z.0000000007