First of all, thanks to everyone (particularly George, whom I've also
thanked off-list) who's participated in this discussion of blue-bodied
earthenware / drab ware / dyed body ware.

Three points really stand out in this discussion for me in terms of the
archaeological significance of these wares:

1) Blue is overwhelmingly the most common colour in archaeological
assemblages.  I haven't personally seen any other colour in an
archaeological assemblage in 15 years of working in the eastern US, UK, and
southeastern Australia - but I've seen plenty of blue (I do have reports of
green bodies from NZ).

1) Archaeologically speaking, these materials are clearly far more relevant
to Australia and New Zealand than to North America.  While quite uncommon
down here, they turn up fairly consistently - but they would appear to be
extremely rare in North America.
They're also probably relevant in the UK as well, as suggested by work I've
previously done on 19th-century Wales and a couple of pieces I saw in the
MOLAS collections this past August.  We need a bit more work to be sure
either way, but even here they seem to be more common in Australasia than in
the UK

2) So why Australasia?  I don't know yet. But I can rule out some
possibilities for Australia specifically (with apologies to our colleagues
across the Tasman Sea). Past research of mine (which should be published -
fingers crossed - in the next 12 months or so), has shown that the
Australian market was strongly affected in the 1860s by the disruption in
the pottery trade caused by the American Civil War - the latter is almost
certainly responsible for the presence of white granite wares in 1860s
Australian assemblages.  Yet since the blue-bodied material turns up on
sites that pre-date the 1860s, and doesn't really turn up in the US before
then, I think we can discard a Civil War connection.  In the same research,
I've also discussed the high probability that certain Staffordshire potters
specifically catered to the newly wealthy Australian market in the wake of
the Australian gold rush of the 1850s.  This raises the totally untested
hypothesis that blue earthenwares were shipped to Australia as a response to
an emerging taste trend in the post-gold rush market.  While I can't rule
out some sort of connection here, reports of examples from 1840s contexts in
Western Australia would indicate that this can't be the only reason.
Which perhaps leaves us with the possibilities that...
     A) What we're seeing here is the shipping of unpopular / unfashionable
goods to an 'immature' colonial market, much as happened with Staffordshire
exports to much of North America prior to the war of 1812.
     B) There might well be some sort of connection to an emerging
Australian taste, but if so, it raises the intriguing possibility that
potters were reacting to this emerging taste _before_ the gold rush.
     C) I might be getting far too excited about a ware type that
realistically doesn't turn up that much, even in Australia and NZ, and the
significance of which is therefore open to question.

Alasdair Brooks