Costly signaling with ceramic tablewares in Spanish colonial America

The archaeological data used for this paper would not exist without decades of support by the UWF Archaeology Institute under the direction of Elizabeth Benchley. We are grateful for the many years of labor by UWF faculty, staff, and students at Spanish West Florida presidios under the direction of Judith Bense. Research at the Port of Veracruz was made possible through the collaborative efforts of Bense and Judith Hernandez Aranda (Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia [INAH]), and with permission from the INAH. Our collaborative research was inspired by Eschbach's initial comparative analyses of tablewares recovered from the West Florida presidios and Nueva Veracruz as part of her dissertation, which received funding from the National Science Foundation (BSC-1240412) and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. For the documentary side of this project, we are grateful to the curator of the Presidio Trust in San Francisco, Liz Melicker, for providing a copy of Veronica Dado's report and transcriptions. Finally, we are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers whose commments led to the strengthening of this article. Any remaining errors are our own.