Historical archaeologists depend upon artifacts as the prime source of information about past occupants of sites from which the artifacts were excavated. These artifacts are analytically useful only to the degree that their meanings and uses in historical context are understood. Documents or other imagery from the time the artifacts were used and deposited are principal providers of this essential information. But some of the most ubiquitous artifacts found in the archaeological record—small, ordinary household things, which should by the fact of their daily presence in the lives of their owners tell us about those lives—were too commonplace and unremarkable to have been discussed much in the historical record. In a turnabout of procedure, information from the archeological sites themselves may become the primary data sets for understanding these heretofore little understood artifacts and their meaning systems. For historical archaeologists have linked a vast number of artifacts with their historical owners and their owners\u27 cultural universe, and these data are available. They can be synthesized to see if discernible patterns of use existed. Rockingham ware was an inexpensive nineteenth-century ceramic widely used in America but hardly mentioned in period documents. I conducted a material culture study of Rockingham ware from two approaches. The first situates Rockingham ware in the context of its production history, which was unique in the history of anglo-American ceramics. The second uses information from artifact assemblages and archaeological site reports to identify patterns of distribution. These demonstrate that while the analysis of Rockingham ware usage per se produced a flat curve, the factors of gender, class, and rural or urban location—and intersections of these factors—markedly affected the choice of vessel forms in Rockingham ware. Plausible explanations of these patterns were forthcoming from documentary sources treating the cultural milieus of Rockingham-ware users. Hints and clues from a variety of sources converged to reveal ways in which certain Rockingham-ware vessels, even so lowly a household item as a Rockingham-ware mixing bowl, were used to negotiate social change and to express and reinforce cultural meanings
