Pewter Porringer

Pewter Porringer

Within the foundational and colonial culinary encounters period, the object I found was a pewter porringer, resting on a soil pedestal. It was found during an excavation called the Siouan Project, specifically at the Fredericks site in Orange County of what is now Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While those who dated the porringer to the historic period of AD 1700, it is not limited to this one year in its use. It is 22.5 centimeters in length and 19.3 centimeters in width. [1​] ​

The excavation that revealed the pewter porringer, the Siouan Project, was conducted by Roy S. Dickens, Jr., R. P. Stephen Davis, Jr., and H. Trawick Ward, starting in 1983. There were several sites that investigated where those who spoke the Siouan language resided, such as around the Neuse, Dan, and Cape Fear rivers. However, the specific site that the porringer was found was called the Fredericks site, also known as Occaneechi town in the beginning of the eighteenth century, close to Hillsborough, North Carolina. [2]​ The excavation was carried out “​to identify and explain the patterns and processes of culture change that accompanied the first encounters with English explorers and traders in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.” [3]​

Pewter was brought to America at least by the early seventeenth century mainly for equipment needed to pioneer new land. As demand grew, more pewter was imported from England and price decreased, making it a more common and widely used material by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It became common for tableware to be composed of pewter, such as plates, spoons, mugs, and porringers. Finding this particular pewter porringer shows this integration of pewter into American every day culinary life, particularly by the Siouans in North Carolina, as well as a shift of a locally rare, expensive material to a much more common, obtainable one.​ Being that this specific object is a porringer, it allowed withholding of cheaper foods such as soups or stew, as opposed to more costly foods such as meats that would not have been contained in such a receptacle. [4​] This supports a better understanding of the culinary culture of Chapel Hill, North Carolina as it shows economic relations and trade with other countries (England), and that it was relevant in an important transition of culinary materials in history.

Notes