Exhibit Preserves Pursuit Of Liberty
Museum Unveils Artifacts From African Americans

By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 2, 2008; C05

An exhibit of hundreds of rare artifacts unearthed in Annapolis over the past 27 years shows that the quest for freedom by African Americans is as much a part of the city's history as the fight for liberty by the wealthy property owners who rebelled against the British.

A central theme of the exhibit, which opens Tuesday, is "the quest of African Americans to create and preserve their integrity and to establish their freedom in a slave society," said Mark Leone, a University of Maryland anthropology professor who directs the Archaeology in Annapolis project, a partnership that, through the years, has involved the university, the city's Banneker-Douglass Museum, the City of Annapolis and the Historic Annapolis Foundation.

The items, which the project has discovered in about 40 digs since 1981 with more than 350 students, professors and others at the university, will be on public display together for the first time in "Seeking Liberty: Annapolis, an Imagined Community" at the museum. The exhibit will be the largest archaeological display ever at the museum, the state's official repository for African American material culture.

About a third of the artifacts in the collection are linked to African Americans.

"What I can tell from the artifacts is the coherence of African American culture, the survival of African practices, ways that African Americans defeated being marginalized," Leone said.

The exhibit, which will run until late November, is designed to mark the 300th anniversary of Annapolis's Royal Charter, which allowed it to hold elections and establish self-governance.

"The main theme of the exhibit is the quests of different groups in Annapolis for greater freedom and liberty," Leone said. "The effort that unifies Annapolis is the effort to make one's own people free."

Annapolis was a well-known port for slavery in Maryland, which freed slaves in 1864.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a section of the printers' type that Jonas Green used to produce a "death's head" stamp, a skull-and-crossbones icon like one used in a 1765 newspaper editorial protesting British taxation. The piece, excavated from the site of Green's print shop, highlights the city's role as a major center of pre-Revolutionary War rebellion.

But Leone said that what sets the exhibit apart from more traditional treatments of Annapolis's history is the emphasis on African American artifacts, some taken from houses where the city's historic figures lived.

"This is the only one that represents the whole city," he said. "The only one that represents black and white Annapolis."

The exhibit focuses on excavations at five landmarks: the Governor Calvert House, the print shop, the Maynard-Burgess House, Reynolds Tavern and the Brice House.

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.