Hoodoo Cache - Archaeology Magazine Archive


Hoodoo Cache	Volume 53 Number 3, May/June 2000
by Elizabeth J. Himelfarb

"Jim always kept that five-center piece round his neck with a string, and said it was a charm the devil give to him with his own hands, and told him he could cure anybody with it and fetch witches whenever he wanted to just by saying something to it; but he never told what it was he said to it."--Huck Finn, Mark Twain

The discovery in Annapolis, Maryland of a deliberate deposit of coins, buttons, beads, doll parts, scraps of fabric, a perfume bottle filled with soil and a seed, seashells, a matchstick, and other relics under a brick floor is changing the way archaeologists think about early African American beliefs in the Chesapeake. The finds, identified during a salvage excavation of the eighteenth-century Brice House (soon to be a conference center), occupied a kitchen and laundry room below a slave and servant quarters.

Jessica Neuwirth, archaeologist with the Historic Annapolis Foundation, says she had hoped to find ritual objects of slaves similar to those that have emerged beneath the flooring at other local sites (see "Secret Religion of Slaves," November/December 1996). It soon became clear that secreted here were not the eighteenth-century root bundles--symbols taken unaltered from an African spiritual practice--that had turned up at similar sites. Instead, here was a nineteenth-century mish-mash of artifacts, including coins (like the one Jim wore in Huck Finn) and buttons dating to the Civil War and after, suggesting the adoption of Hoodoo, a religion that fused African and American influences. Scholars have argued that African culture could not persist in a region like the Chesapeake, where contact between the black and white communities was constant and black population density was not so high as further south.

As archaeologists continued to dig, the shape of a cosmogram, a sacred African form comprising a circle inscribed with a cross, began to emerge in the arrangement of artifacts. The cosmogram would have delineated this as a sacred, ritual space. Other finds were clustered around the doorway and fireplaces.

"Objects mark entrances, exits, chimneys--places spirits come and go, places people come and go," Neuwirth says. "It's a crossroads between this world and the other world; a temporary altar. If you're a fan of the Blues, then you know about going down to the crossroads."

Finds like those throughout Annapolis are familiar to excavators in the deep south, but little reported beyond. "People would certainly find this stuff if they were looking," Neuwirth insists. "If you look at site reports, finds have been recorded, but archaeologists don't know what to do with it."

The artifacts have been taken to the University of Maryland lab and will eventually be displayed in Baltimore. Neuwirth says that removing the artifacts was the most sensitive course of action. "Had we not dug this material up, it would have been destroyed and lost forever. These materials have a life--a useful living life as a bridge between this world and the spirit world. Now that the practitioner is gone, whatever energy these things had is done with."