In terms of decoration, some authors have sought to identify correlations with West African styles and patterns. In a collection of Afro-Jamaican ceramics from the seventeenth century, Meyers (1999) identifies decorative elements redolent of the ceramic traditions of Ghana, a region which supplied many of the enslaved people sent to Jamaica. The similarities are found mainly in the imprints, which do not correspond to previous Amerindian traditions. In his analysis of decorated pipes produced locally in plantations in the Chesapeake Bay area at the end of the seventeenth century, Emerson (1999) claims that the faceted forms and decorative techniques such as stippling, imprinting and filling with white clay reveal strong correlations with pipes from sixteenth-century West African contexts.  
The identification of such correlations between ceramic styles and traditions on the two sides of the Atlantic has been met with scepticism by some archaeologists, who have argued that this tends to neglect the cultural diversity and shifts that occurred in the communities of West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade, where research has pointed to significant historical and regional variations in the ceramic artefacts related to local responses to political and economic pressures (Gijanto and Ogundiran, 2011, pp. 244-245). The situational character of identity must also be considered, given that such an approach tends to freeze identities which are, by nature, fluid and dynamic, meaning that they should be considered only in context (Hauser and DeCorse, 2003, p. 69). Such a scenario means that ceramics from different contexts of the colonial world are effectively categorized as 'African', ignoring the complexity of the social and historical contexts (Hauser and Armstrong, 1999, p. 66). A further problem is that of underestimating the Indigenous influence on the material (Steen, 2011).