Colonoware is a low fired earthenware pottery made from the 1500s to the 1740s. It represents the fusion of Indigenous, African, and European cultures in colonial Carolina. Enslaved Africans brought their regionally distinctive pottery recipes to the colonies from West and Central Africa. As enslaved Africans built settlements in towns and plantations on the Carolina coast they established alliances with local Indigenous groups. Colonoware is found at sites associated with enslaved Africans and settlements affiliated with enslaved and free Indigenous peoples, so it provides important insights into the ways these groups negotiated enslavement, plantation life, and networks of trade and exchange, while establishing new cultural traditions in the lowcountry. As a result, colonoware is important as a pottery traditions, but also as a part of the foodways and spiritual and medicinal practices of the colonial period.

This collection is currently on display at the Gullah Museum in Georgetown, South Carolina.