Exhibit Preserves Pursuit Of Liberty

On display will be a model of the basement of one of the houses where African spiritual relics were found, said Amelia Harris, the museum's exhibitions specialist. The model shows that the relics were buried in a pattern resembling the ovular shape of a cosmogram, a symbol of African spirit practices.

"My goal in this was to make it visual; otherwise, this would have been a display of broken plates and bottles," Harris said.

The Archaeology in Annapolis project, designed to promote better understanding of the city's history through the interpretation of material culture, has yielded 750,000 artifacts.

The print shop excavation alone unearthed 11,000 pieces of printers' type, Leone said. And found beneath the floor of the Calvert House were early 18th-century artifacts, including family jewelry, in pristine condition.

"The material there was so rich that we could barely believe it," Leone said.

Also buried under the floor was a Hand of Fatima, a Muslim symbol that offers protection from spirits. It is thought to have belonged to a slave.

In 1990, researchers unearthed artifacts at another house that were determined to be evidence of African spirit practices.

"When we discovered African American traditions, we knew that we hit pay dirt," Leone said.

The spiritual caches or "mojos" -- which include pins, white disks, pierced coins, black pebbles and feathers -- were designed "to control spirits for the health and well-being of the inhabitants" and were placed in a " narrow range of places in the house," he said.

Collectively, the artifacts suggest that black culture was multifaceted.

The excavation of the Maynard-Burgess House -- first owned before the Civil War by John Maynard, a free black man -- revealed a large collection of tin cans and bottles that bore the names of national brands of foods and medicines. One of the items, which is in the exhibit, is a small blue bottle with the brand name Bromo-Seltzer, an indication that the Maynard family followed a common African American practice of buying products with predetermined contents and prices that couldn't be arbitrarily raised by unscrupulous store owners.

The Maynard-Burgess did not reveal spiritual caches, but there was a prayer book used by the African Methodist Church.

Leone said the discovery told researchers that African spirit practices had "only been used by some members of the community."

Leone said that Archaeology in Annapolis has turned the city into a field school for researchers. It has also generated 13 doctoral dissertations and more than a half-dozen books. The product of that work -- and the lesson of the exhibit -- is "not only how people preserved their African American heritage, but how they fought racism," Leone said.