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Our Next Program will be North Carolina Ceramics Through the Centuries, an illustrated lecture tracing ceramics traditions in North Carolina, presented by Linda Carnes-McNaughton. Linda is a long-time CCHA supporter and Registered Professional Archaeologist specializing in ceramics. Among the traditions she will discuss and illustrate in her talk are several celebrated potters from the Mudlick community in Chatham and southern Alamance County. Don’t miss it!
This program will be the second in CCHA’s 2025 Gene Brooks lecture series, which honors the contributions to Chatham history of the late Gene Brooks through his teaching and advocacy for the preservation and sharing of Chatham history.
About Linda Carnes-McNaughton, PhD RPA
As a professional archaeologist, researcher and cultural resources manager for over 40 years, Linda has specialized in cultural material studies, primarily from terrestrial sites in the southeastern United States and most recently in submerged resources. She has an undergraduate degree from Georgia State University, attended graduate studies at University of Tennessee and later earned a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1997). Her dissertation project focused on North Carolina’s 19th-century earthenware and stoneware pottery. She authored numerous books and articles related to her studies on pottery, pirate culture, cemeteries, tar kilns, historic sites, and other areas of interest in regional, national and international publications. She is a current member of the NCAC, NCAS, SHA, SEAC, NC Pottery Center, the NC Scottish Heritage Society, and local historical societies. She was for 12 years the Historic Sites Supervisor for NC DNCR, Historic Sites Section, and in 2003 became the Curator and Program Archaeologist for Fort Bragg’s Cultural Resources Program where she worked for 20 years. Her interest in global pottery led her to volunteer on the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project, identifying pottery found on the wreck site. This research led to other artifacts studies from the 1718 shipwreck. With Mark Wilde-Ramsing, she co-authored an article in the 2015 “Blackbeard’s QAR and its French Connection” in Pieces of Eight, UNA Press. In 2018 she and Mark Wilde-Ramsing co-authored a book devoted to the QAR project titles, Blackbeard’s Sunken Prize: the 300-year voyage of Queen Anne’s Revenge, published by UNC Press. In 2021 she published another seminal article on global foodways and ceramics from a 1718 shipwreck site in Excavating the Histories of Slave-Trade and Pirates Ships, Springer Press. In 2021 she was inducted in the Marquis’s Who’s Who in America for her scholarship, publications, and public service record. Linda retired after 20 years as a federal archaeologist with DoD, in January 2024. Linda and Kirk call Pittsboro home where they have lived since 1984 in the wooded sanctuary of Saralyn along with their cats, Ruby and Opal.
