Slave Artifacts Prove They Kept Their Religion

Black and white pebbles, bent pins and other artifacts found at an 18th century home help prove African slaves maintained their religious practices despite efforts to convert them to Christianity.

The items are believed to be the remains of bundles hidden by slaves who served the white occupants of the five-level Slayton House beginning in the late 1700s.

The bundles are proof that slaves forced to become Christians still practiced their West African religion years after the first slaves arrived in America, said Mark Leone, a professor of archeology at the University of Maryland.

“Generations of African Americans lived in this house. Long after their arrival from West Africa, their traditions of healing, prediction and safety had survived,” Leone said this week.

The findings are part of a three-year dig at the brick house built in 1774 by John Ridout, then secretary to the provincial governor of Maryland.

The house was donated to Historic Annapolis, which gave university archeologists the run of the building for their research.

The dig has national significance, Leone said, because it is the first in the United States in which archeologists setting out to look for evidence of slave religious practices picked certain areas to explore and found evidence in each area. They knew where to look for the religious objects because of information from histories based on the recollections of slaves.

The caches--all found in the basement of the row house--usually included the pebbles or buttons representing death and life. There were also discs with a hole in the center, pins and crystals, all believed to have been used to predict the future, heal the sick and protect the slaves. “They were part of a whole tradition of managing the spirit world,” Leone said.

The basement was where slaves lived and worked and was largely a dark world, said Lynn Jones, who is working on the dig as part of her doctoral studies in archeology. Whites usually entered only to supervise activities.

“You had this whole complex of black folks living there under some really constrained conditions,” she said.