Basketry, art and craft of making interwoven objects, usually containers, from flexible vegetable fibres, such as twigs, grasses, osiers, bamboo, and rushes, or from plastic or other synthetic materials. The containers made by this method are called baskets. Learn More.

Basket making has likely been a part of North Carolina's history as long as human beings have inhabited the region. Although the fragility of basket materials means that few related artifacts still exist, the Native Americans of North Carolina's Paleo-Indian period (13,000 B.C. to 8000 B.C.) probably used baskets that they constructed from native materials for transporting items and gathering food.

Basket-making traditions from the eighteenth century to the modern era in North Carolina possess Native American, European, and African origins. The history of the craft reflects social, economic, and environmental changes faced by its practitioners. The variety of cultures in the state influenced each other. Older forms of basket making were adapted to newer materials even as older basket makers passed on their knowledge and traditions to younger generations. Baskets were an essential part of most households into the early twentieth century, used for gathering, storing, transporting, and measuring. Basket makers typically made their baskets after the planting or harvesting seasons and used such indigenous materials to color them as bloodroot (orange), yellow root (yellow), black walnut (brown), and butternut (black). Learn More.

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