The history of Southern pottery comes from the ground. It is manifest not only in the rich clays of the region, but also in the broken sherds of long-forgotten earthenware and stoneware vessels. In many respects, the South has taken the lead in investigating historic pottery sites. During the last century, archaeology has illuminated the work of American Indian potters and led to the identification of myriad ceramic traditions introduced by European immigrants. Systematic documentary research and fieldwork undertaken by MESDA, its parent organization Old Salem Museums & Gardens, and other Southern institutions have also contributed a great deal to our understanding of the region's ceramics. Since its founding in 1965, MESDA has recorded thousands of examples of Southern earthenware and stoneware and compiled information on hundreds of potters.

American Indians began making terracotta pottery more than three thousand years ago, but higher-temperature wares were not produced before European settlement. The earliest European kiln discovered in North America is at the site of St. Elena, a Spanish settlement founded in South Carolina in 1556-1587. Excavations there revealed dozens of plain and decorated earthenware vessels thought to date from 1577 to 1587 and fragments of an alembic used for distillation.
 
Colonists arriving at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement, brought a diverse range of Old World ceramics to furnish their homes and fulfill such basic needs as cooking, storage, and serving.  Pottery, porcelain, and other artifacts found there dispel the notion that early settlements were meager and primitive. Indeed, most seventeenth-century sites contain fragments of vessels produced in England, Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and China. The cosmopolitan nature of this material, representing every ceramic technology of the time, is a direct result of world trade networks that made the latest and most fashionable goods available to far-reaching settlements in North America.

Adapted from "Earth Transformed: Early Southern Pottery in the MESDA and Old Salem Collections" in The Magazine Antiques (1/2007) article by Luke Beckerdite, independent scholar and editor of American Furniture, and Robert Hunter, independent scholar and editor of Ceramics in America.