Exhibits

Ilearned from the Historic Preservation Commission’s attempt to shut down Archaeology in Annapolis that capitalism was not going to tolerate a critique, no matter how mild or homegrown. Althusser argued that ideology would prevail and he is correct. Lukacs’s position was not useful in opening up and sustaining consciousness. If I were to be persistent, I would need to see that Althusser was correct but, because I did not want to give up on democracy, I had to ask whether Habermas could provide an option for creating consciousness. Given that this is an autobiography that attempts to relay how I used my emotion, I also was angry at the behavior of the members of the Historic Preservation Commission and its local archaeologists and was determined to try alternatives. I used the anger. I did not express it publicly. Selection from: Can an African-American Historical Archaeology be an Alternative Voice?<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn14_1"> ^* </xref>

We consider ourselves to be part of a debate within historical archaeology about our role within the United States. On one side, the debate features a conventional way for archaeology to discover the pasts of those normally ignored, or thought to be anonymous. On the other side is our position [derived from Habermas], which sees historical archaeology as capable of providing a critique of our own society by using history. We will describe this debate in order to situate an African-American historical archaeology.

Historical archaeology is considered an exploration of European expansion and settlement through material remains. It can be thought of as an exploration of the spread of Europeans around the world, primarily through the process of establishing colonies. Thus, historical archaeology can trace the remains of forts, ports, factories, cities, suburbs, mines, plantations and farms, among other institutions. Archaeology is associated with these institutions as they facilitated European expansion since the fifteenth century.

The expansion of Europe was led, if one reads the documents and looks at pictures, by white men of status and stature. But, since we all know that many people were involved in and were absorbed by this process, how are we to know this from their perspective? Their perspective is of value either because it offers unvoiced comments, which could be useful to us today, or because in a democracy all voices deserve a hearing, regardless of their content. And, additionally, it has been argued that those alive now count on an appropriately presented past in order to safeguard a reasonable future.

Historical archaeology has access to the material remains and thus, people reason, the daily lives in the past of women, children, foot soldiers and sailors, slaves, freed slaves, Native Americans from the moment of contact, the insane, the gaoled as well as anybody else who has ever used a dish, chamberpot, room, privy, or medicine-bottle. While many, many such people have gone unrecorded historically, such people did often live in and were spatially segregated in countless ways. Consequently, there is a distinctive archaeological record for them. And studying them is worthwhile.

It is worthwhile because if people alive now have unrecognized and undiscussed histories, then we are all poorer because only one view—or very few views—is not enough to understand history. . . .

Since the creation of Archaeology in Annapolis in 1981, we have been fairly successful in exploring histories of the white residents of Annapolis. However, we also realised that we were overlooking a large portion of the city by not explicitly addressing the historic experiences of African Americans in our work (Hodder 1986; Beaudry 1990; Beaudry et al. 1991; Brown 1992; Yentsch 1991). To address this problem we began an initiative in 1988 to explore the histories of African Americans. Based on our experiences of the past five years we believe that an African-American historical archaeology is an illustration of the contemporary relevance of historical archaeology. There is a distinct African-American voice; it can be heard; and it [is] critical. . . .

Byron Rushing has said that African Americans want to know how and why they are here now—they want to know why there is no change for them now. White people typically don’t want to know these things. They choose to remain blind. Within this paraphrase of Rushing’s quote, we argue, may lie the solution to the critique of the dominant ideology thesis and of how to realise historical archaeology’s role of exemplifying anonymous histories. If an African-American voice, or a woman’s voice, or anyone else’s can protest current circumstances and unify class membership sufficiently by showing common roots, the goals of both ways of doing historical archaeology might be achieved.

The nine of us, as authors, conceived of a project that involved discussions about the questions to be asked by archaeologists, places to excavate, members of the black community to be interviewed about their history, exhibiting all the results in local public museums, and visitor evaluations of the results. None of us was involved in every phase of this joint work, but the resultant whole would not have been the same without each part and person, as well as the cooperation that produced the whole. We have found it easier to refer to ourselves as “we” in this essay, rather than using specific names all the time when specific parts of the project are described.

In order to explore the possibility of African-American historical archaeology as an alternative voice, we were guided by Shanks and Tilley’s (1987) fourfold hermeneutic and Habermas’s (1976, 1984, 1989) theory of communicative action. The hermeneutic suggests that there are many contexts to be understood and attended to in conceptualising archaeology. One part of the hermeneutic is that of living within contemporary society as an active participant. More broadly, it entails gaining knowledge of that which is to be human, in order to interact and participate with others and to be involved in struggles about beliefs and social and political values (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 108). . . .

One of the first actions of an African-American historical archaeology in Annapolis involved discussion with the two leaders of the Banneker-Douglass Museum, the home of the State of Maryland’s Commission on Afro-American History and Culture, Steven Newsome and Barbara Jackson-Nash. Barbara Jackson asked of Mark Leone and Mark Warner three questions which have guided Archaeology in Annapolis since 1988: “Do African Americans have archaeology?”, “We’re tired of hearing about slavery; tell us about freedom!”, and “Is there anything left from Africa?” These questions and command have such great value because they are at once political and historical. They speak for a community that sees unbroken continuity and considers history as political action. These were and remain archaeological questions, anthropological questions, political questions, and questions which invited being “involved in struggles about beliefs and social and political values” (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 108; Habermas 1976, 1984, 1989). . . .

[It has turned out to be the case that] there are intact sites all over Annapolis from the eighteenth century to today that are African American. Several have been excavated by our project and, since there are locales where free people lived, they not only answer the first question, but they also deal with daily life in conditions of freedom. The archaeology of sites where free people lived produces three kinds of information. Analysis of the artifacts from excavations shows both how similar the artifacts are to sites occupied by contemporary whites and also shows some evidence of economic and even ethnic differences. And, when combined with oral history, analysis provides a partial look into local American racism from within. There is, thus, in our joint work beginning to be knowledge useful to blacks, knowledge about how they are the same as whites, knowledge about differences with whites, and some knowledge of what creates the deeper differences within American society.

Artifacts

Since 1988, Archaeology in Annapolis has excavated three sites occupied by free African Americans and one occupied by both enslaved African Americans and their white masters. Each of those excavations recovered a significant volume of material culture including ceramics, bottle glass, food remains, and other household refuse which was acquired, used, and discarded by African Americans.

These excavations have established that there is indeed a rich archaeological record of the African-American experience in Annapolis, particularly of the free black community, and some excavated objects have documented the persistence of cultural practices that come from African cultures. We have begun to use these artifacts to interpret how African-Americans simultaneously have been absorbed by dominant ideologies while resisting certain elements of those very ideologies. These fundamental dimensions of the African-American archaeological project are intended both to serve the social interests of local black constituents and to demonstrate to the academic community the social and intellectual viability of our perspective.

Our first excavation of a site exclusively occupied by African Americans was at Gott’s Court. Gott’s Court was a series of twenty-five connected, two-storey wooden houses built about 1906 and occupied exclusively by African-American renters into the early 1950s. Gott’s Court’s tenants were primarily employed in service positions in Annapolis, such as day laborers, laundresses, and cooks. The Court was located on the interior of a city block within sight of the State House dome two blocks away. Like other contemporaneous alley communities in Annapolis and other American cities, the Court was invisible from the surrounding streets (Warner 1992b).

Although the excavations at Gott’s Court were limited, the artifact assemblages suggested several points for investigation on subsequent African-American sites. The insight was that excavated artifacts could indeed be effective in stimulating dialogue about how to interpret the histories of peripheralised people. We confronted this after excavating a steel comb. After the archaeologists worked fruitlessly to determine the object’s function, an African-American woman explained that the object was a “hot” or “straightening” comb, a steel comb which was heated to straighten hair. The archaeologists initially surmised that straightening hair was an effort to assimilate, but this notion was quickly rejected by African Americans. They instead saw the comb as an artifact which was used merely to give the appearance of assimilation. Indeed, some African Americans saw racism in the archaeologists’ initial inability to recognise hair-straightening as a conscious social strategy. The archaeologists were forced to acknowledge that this single object and all its associated cultural connotations . . . acquired different meanings between different contemporary and historical communities. In that sense, the comb was able to foster dialogue between contemporary African Americans and at least one group of white archaeologists.

The Gott’s Court assemblage also stressed that African-American consumption strategies sometimes are quite subtle in their differences from dominant strategies. We were not surprised to recover a large collection of bottle glass from our excavation, since post-1900 bottle-production technologies were sufficiently specialised to manufacture large quantities of inexpensive bottled goods. The goods contained in these vessels can be identified by embossed designs and bottle forms, so they provide reliable information on the types of bottled goods being consumed: for example, pharmaceutical, soda, wine, liquor, etc. Bottles also tend to enter the archaeological record rapidly, because they are bought for their contents rather than for the bottle itself. Consequently, glass bottles provide sensitive information about the type and time of consumption.

https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315431215/7f73df02-7d05-484c-af2f-f2dc2561f5a4/content/fig21_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Hot comb. Also known as a straightening comb, a hot comb was heated on a stove and then used to make hair straight. The wooden handle is missing. Hair straightening had a double meaning and intention among African Americans, because straightening was used to create the image of accommodating European tastes but was done so deliberately, not to deny African American identity, but to indicate knowledge of the white world and its racist demands. Drawing courtesy of Archaeology in Annapolis.

When we compared the types of bottle glass goods to those from a contemporaneous white-occupied site in Annapolis called the Main Street site (Shackel 1986), there were no significant differences which seemed “African American.” Pharmaceutical, that is, patent medicines, were the most common type of early twentieth century bottled product at Gott’s Court: 38% of the total assemblage, and 45% at Main Street, a few blocks away (Warner 1991: 9). The percentages of all alcoholic goods, which includes pharmaceutical as well as liquors and wine, was also quite similar, comprising 69% of the Gott’s Court assemblage and 58% of that on Main Street. Consumption of bottled goods appears to be similar between these two assemblages.

The appearance of partial economic assimilation is being more thoroughly analysed at an African-American residence on nearby Duke of Gloucester Street, occupied circa 1847–1980. The Maynard-Burgess house was built about 1847 by John and Maria Maynard, a free black and a slave, and was subsequently occupied by the Burgess family from 1915 until the 1980s, who were also African Americans (McWilliams 1991). After two years of excavations, the Maynard-Burgess assemblage has provided a larger and more diverse collection of objects to investigate African-American consumption strategies, particularly through the analysis of bottles and food remains.

In 1991, a cellar containing 85 bottles with a mean date of 1881 was excavated at the Maynard-Burgess site (Mullins and Warner n.d.). Of those vessels, 25% (21 bottles) were classified as liquor/whiskey, the most common type in the cellar, and 19% (16 vessels) were pharmaceutical. Yet, of those 21 bottles classified as liquor, six were Udolpho Wolfe’s Schiedam Aromatic Schnapps, a highly alcoholic, very popular “medicinal gin” advertised to have multi-purpose therapeutic effects (Schulz et al. 1980: 37–38). These may well have been consciously consumed as “medicines,” regardless of their alcoholic content. Six mineral water bottles were also included in the cellar assemblage, and this bottled water from natural springs was typically consumed for its medicinal effects as well (Schulz et al. 1980: 111). If just the Wolfe vessels and the mineral water bottles were reclassified as pharmaceutical, then pharmaceutical would comprise 33% of the assemblage (28 vessels). That percentage is slightly lower, yet still comparable to the percentage of medicines recovered from Gott’s Court (38%) and Main Street (45%).

What this similarity in bottled-good consumption suggests is that this one form of material consumption was quite effectively homogenising different social groups. A high percentage of bottled foods (16%, 14 vessels) might at first glance seem to suggest further assimilation of the Maynards into the market in the late nineteenth century. Yet in examining the very diverse and well-preserved food remains from the site we saw a very wide range of acquisition strategies. This diversity indicates that these two African-American households resisted the trend to acquire food through the market.

Food remains—animal bones, shells, fish scales, etc.—were recovered in large quantities at the Maynard-Burgess site. An addition built on to the rear of the house in about 1875 preserved dense deposits of yard refuse and construction debris dating to the period 1847–75, and upper layers included deposits of quite recent food remains which had been taken under the house by small animals and rodents[;] we can offer some initial analyses and insights which suggest both ethnically distinctive and class-specific food-consumption strategies.

Turtles as a source of food were not unique to African Americans. Turtle remains have been consistently recovered in small amounts from many sites in Annapolis (Lev-Tov 1987; Reitz 1987). On the Maynard-Burgess property turtle remains were slightly more prevalent than what was recovered from the Main Street site (Mullins and Warner n.d.). However, the quantitative similarities between the two sites do not address potential differences in the social significance of turtles as a food source.

Oral history accounts recall that turtles were caught as part of individual fishing excursions and not purchased at the market—a point which suggests that African Americans avoided and consequently resisted the market through the private acquisition of foods. Additionally, the turtle shells were decorated by children and used as doorstops in the house (Kaiser n.d.).

A more explicit example of the significance of foodways is the recovery of a large number of pig mandibles and feet from the Maynard-Burgess property. Oral accounts have frequently mentioned the importance of hog’s head and black-eyed peas for holidays such as New Year’s Eve (Kaiser n.d.). The combination of archaeological and oral history data suggests that household consumption patterns were not exclusively based on the market economy but were at least partially related to ethnic food preferences.

Analysis of one deposit from the Maynard-Burgess house indicates both similarities and quite clear differences from the faunal assemblage recovered from Main Street. At both sites, the percentage of fowl was quite similar (30% at Maynard-Burgess and 39% at Main Street), suggesting that birds were a relatively basic part of most Annapolitan diets, although their preparation and mealtime presentation may well have differed between groups. Mammals accounted for 43% of the bones recovered from the Maynard-Burgess deposit, yet they comprised only 20% of the Main Street assemblage. Fish accounted for 24% of the Maynard assemblage, but only 7% of the Main Street faunal assemblage was fish (Warner 1992a).

The differences in the percentage of mammals consumed probably reflects both ethnicity and class. The Maynards were by no means impoverished, so any reference to economics accounts only partially for the differences. They may have had restricted access to the market—that is, they probably could not shop with some of Annapolis’s butchers—but that influence reflects racist ideology more than it indicates an inability to afford certain cuts of meat.

The presence of fish and turtle remains suggests more reliance on foods which could be obtained readily from the Chesapeake Bay, which is just two blocks from both the Maynard-Burgess and Main Street sites. Such reliance, though, may have been experienced by African Americans as a way of gaining some economic independence from the market.

In analysing these artifacts, which are individually no different from those on any other site in Annapolis, it became clear that we needed a persuasive way to contextualise African-American consumption. We felt confident that the context in which these objects were acquired, consumed, and discarded was quite distinctive in the African-American community, yet documents provided only suggestive information about the cultural context. To interpret the everyday African-American world and its relationship to material culture, we incorporated interviews with African Americans which discussed how excavated objects were part of African-American society.

Oral Histories

Members of the project posed general questions to elicit stories about artifacts, and in some cases asked specific queries, such as questions about children’s games and china. In turn we heard rich accounts about playing marbles, eating large Sunday breakfasts with the family, going to church, paying fifty cents a week for fine china bought on the installment plan, three generations of women doing the laundry on wash days, and fishing expeditions.

Some of the stories provided an African-American context to the artifacts. The former Franklin Street residents described how extended families acquired and made clothing for children; what it was like as children not to attend the same school as their white playmates; the experience of being allowed to buy food to carry out, but of being prohibited from eating food at the counter of the Little Tavern Restaurant; and the experience of listening to your grandmother read to your illiterate grandfather the Saturday Evening Post by the light of a kerosene lamp.

We understood from the beginning that we were not collecting oral history in order to do better archaeology. The request to listen to the recollections of residents of the former houses being excavated was initiated by a member of the African-American community, Barbara Jackson-Nash, and we understood that the stories were not only valued in and of themselves but that they had a special status for the community, rather like that of written records for the white community. We understood, too, that this enterprise could offer us the opportunity to see the other side of life in Annapolis, including economics and racism, and, through archaeology, the history of both, which might extend beyond memory. Thus oral history might provide access to a critical commentary of contemporary and past society in Annapolis.

The oral history entailed, as Hodder (1991: 15) has described interpretation, “listening, understanding and accommodation among different voices rather than being solely the application of universal instruments of measurement.” Based on conversation with Banneker-Douglass staff, an outline of general questions was prepared for interviews with five former residents of Franklin Street. These people, identified by Jackson-Nash, were interviewed in the summer of 1991 by several archaeologists about the layout of their houses and backyards. When Kaiser, who did most of the key oral history, met with them in the spring of 1992, they were already familiar with the project and interested in helping the archaeologists interpret the artifacts.

The former residents of Franklin Street were first asked broad open-ended questions about the neighborhood, what it looked like, where the children played, what the adults did, and generally what went on outside. They were then asked about the interiors of the houses, the preparation of food, and family life, since archaeologists wanted to learn how the artifacts were used and what they meant to African Americans. Respondents in general were not guided or influenced, so that they were given the opportunity to describe their world as they remembered it. This showed that, as Margaret Purser (1992: 28) has described it, “oral history is an inherently collaborative process, between interviewer and interviewee, between story teller and audience.”

Exhibit

Two factors led all these authors to participate in an exhibit that contained both the archaeological material and the oral history. The Banneker-Douglass staff felt that the African-American community would be interested in the archaeology since it was virtually unique in everyone’s experience. And the archaeologists, long involved in public explanation of archaeological method, wanted to continue to try to reach black and white audiences with views of Annapolitan society from an alternative and, they hoped, a critical perspective, one that developed consciousness of society as it was and is.

Once the interviews had been transcribed, Archaeology in Annapolis and the Banneker-Douglass Museum staffs met to decide what texts would be selected for the exhibit. This was a dialogue about the past, one “enabled by an assumption of momentary political equality, one which recognizes competing interests in the past and suggests negotiating these interests” (Leone and Potter 1992: 140). One result of the dialogue was a general agreement about which texts should be included, with one exception. Stories about taking food from the Naval Academy as a way of getting food during the Depression were not included. The Banneker-Douglass staff thought they were too negative. The archaeologists did not think the stories reflected negatively on African Americans but, rather, revealed the consequences of racism and limited economic opportunity—circumstances the archaeologists thought were important to include.

The exhibit was planned and mounted three times, twice in Annapolis and once in southern Maryland. Laurence Hurst, designer for the Banneker-Douglass Museum, created the floor plans, case arrangement, and integration of the exhibit for its two installations in Annapolis. The exhibit design was straightforward, and was done with a $1,200 mini-grant from the Maryland Humanities Council and many hours of volunteer labor.

The exhibit separated the archaeological sites shown—Franklin Street, Gott’s Court, and Benjamin Banneker homesite—and then divided cases into kitchen artifacts, architectural artifacts, and toys. The artifacts in the exhibit included bits of ceramic, bottle glass, buttons, and parts of porcelain dolls. To the museum staff, and to the archaeologists, most of the artifacts could have belonged to anybody. Only one artifact was identifiably “African American”, and that was the metal straightening-comb.

The novelty of the exhibit came from its very existence—no such exhibit had ever been mounted before in Annapolis and probably in Maryland. And, second, in its use of oral histories as the main texts, we tried something unusual in blending artifacts and community identification. In this sense, the people who lived in the neighborhoods and who knew the excavated and exhibited materials made the commentary.

Three of Laurence Hurst’s drawings [not reprinted] for the exhibit show how a blueprint for an exhibit was essential to integrating exhibit areas, print and artifacts, labels and larger placards, color, classes of things, and numbers and sizes of artifacts. The archaeologists had no idea at first about what to choose, [or] how to display or identify the artifacts. Working in an African-American space with an exhibit designer who knew its special needs and offerings made the exhibition work through the careful selection of material for all these criteria. . . .

We all discovered that the exhibit could be self-sustaining and self-correcting. Wherever it was moved, a new community’s needs presented new material for display; wherever it was received by new parts of the African-American community, new data, new ideas, opinions and facts became available for inclusion. When the exhibit was moved to the Shiplap House Museum, a building owned by the Historic Annapolis Foundation, the archaeologists curated this exhibit. Because of time constraints, the Banneker-Douglass staff and the archaeologists did not meet to decide what texts would be put on the wall, so that there was no dialogue between the two staffs prior to this exhibit’s opening. The archaeologists decided to use the quote about taking food from the Naval Academy, but they included additional text that described what it was like to be poor during the Depression in order to give taking food a context. The Banneker-Douglass Museum staff did not object when they read it on the wall.

The most compelling illustration of the self-correcting aspect of the exhibit process we jointly defined involves the former residents of Gott’s Court who were displeased with the newspaper article which resulted from a major excavation on their former homes. The excavation and article were not part of Archaeology in Annapolis. One former resident had contacted Jackson-Nash because of an article in the Arundel Sun, a local newspaper, which described the houses in Gott’s Court as “ramshackle.” The residents from Gott’s Court considered the article demeaning, believed that it portrayed their neighborhood as dirty, and they wanted to respond to it. Jackson-Nash suggested that they meet with the Archaeology in Annapolis staff who would interview them about their past and help them develop a response to the newspaper article.

The Gott’s Court residents met with project staff, learned about the oral history project, and visited the exhibit at Shiplap House Museum. They laughed at the quotes about chicken feet soup and strongly disagreed with the stories about taking food from the Naval Academy, claiming that people in Gott’s Court did not do that. It was explained that the texts represented other versions of the past. Their memories of Gott’s Court, which were just as valid, could be added to the text.

The oral history interviews with Gott’s Court residents have followed the same outlines used with the Franklin Street residents. Additionally, there have been several group interviews. A preliminary selection of texts related to the artifacts was made and presented to them for their approval. Their stories portray them as a clean, close-knit group of people who helped each other. These quotes were added to the exhibit at its third location, the Jefferson-Patterson Museum in southern Maryland.

Evaluation of the Exhibit

Voluntary, spontaneous visitor participation has always been an important component of Archaeology in Annapolis on-site educational programs. Such participation has usually taken two forms: tour discussions and written visitor evaluations. Discussions held at the end of every tour have given visitors the opportunity to ask questions, challenge archaeologists’ interpretations, and offer interpretations of their own. One-page visitor evaluation forms have asked for demographic information and analysis of program content and effectiveness (Potter and Leone 1987).

As part of the central commitment to make the African-American initiative a community-based project, archaeologists and museum professionals have used visitors’ responses as an important source of information to gather reactions, to see whether messages were acceptable, got across, provoked dialogue, strong disagreement, as well as to plan subsequent public programs. Did a dialogue occur? Was there any hint that alternative voices produced consciousness of conditions within our own society? These are different questions, and this section summarizes visitor responses.

More than 300 written evaluations have been collected at the African-American exhibits (Logan 1991). Through the questionnaires, visitors indirectly became decision-makers in developing educational programs, illustrating the first result.

In September 1990, during Annapolis’s annual Kunta Kinte Commemoration and High Heritage Festival, over 350 people visited excavations on the Franklin Street site, adjacent to the Banneker-Douglass Museum. Approximately half of the site visitors that day were African Americans, and 25% of the total number of visitors filled out questionnaires—an unusually high rate of response (Logan 1990).

Many enthusiastically positive responses were passed along to the project members through these evaluations, indicating that programs in African-American history were long overdue. Futhermore, most respondents indicated that they did not want to see this initiative begin and end with archaeological excavations. For example, when asked, “What would you like to see in future tours?”, most responded that they would like to see examples of the many archaeological finds put on display (Logan 1991: 12–13).

In an effort to satisfy this request and to continue working with the local African-American community in exploring its past, archaeologists and museum professionals created the exhibit entitled “The Maryland Black Experience as Understood through Archaeology.” The total number of visitors to the exhibit at the Banneker-Douglass Museum was 842, and 149 questionnaires were completed—a return rate of 18%; 10,789 visitors viewed the Shiplap House exhibit, yet only 106 questionnaires were completed—a return rate of less than 1%. Although no specific numbers on ethnicity were recorded, a high percentage of Banneker-Douglass visitors were African Americans, whereas most visitors to the Shiplap House were whites.

The general purpose of the evaluations was to help the exhibit’s creators answer their own question: Did the exhibit work? Project members developed three questionnaires during the exhibit, but since all were very similar, no attempt has been made to analyze each questionnaire-type separately. However, one general observation about the different forms is worth mentioning before discussing individual responses. The forms available to visitors at the Banneker-Douglass Museum consisted of questions that required checks to indicate answers or preferences for future work: that is, they included no spaces for text responses. There were no questions requiring written answers, and nowhere on the form were visitors explicitly encouraged to write down additional thoughts.

Nevertheless, some visitors included very powerful responses on these surveys: . . .

So few blacks realize through their constant struggle they have a rich background that needs to be remembered and kept in mind.

I felt the oral and archaeological perspectives complemented each other really well, like a call and response from church. I thought that this was a wonderful exhibition and it just pointed out how much more we need to learn and for so many reasons. . . . All in all, this history seems so important (for many reasons!) because so much of the history of this area is one colonial (white) history. . . . How about something from another perspective! Thank goodness for the Banneker-Douglass Museum. (Logan 1991: 14)

Visitors to the Shiplap House exhibit often commented on how similar daily life was for the people depicted in the exhibit as compared to their own daily lives today. When asked, “What did you learn about the history of African Americans in Annapolis?” many respondents repeated (more or less accurately) basic points from the exhibit texts:

About 1/3 of free people in Annapolis in the nineteenth century were black.

The most important fact was that there were free black families in the 1800s.

Free blacks comprised a large portion of the population of Annapolis and not all were poor.

They lived more like civilized humans with more rights, freedoms, and privileges than the African Americans about whom I’ve heard.

I had not known that 1/3 of the population of Annapolis has consistently been African Americans and they had contributed as much as they did to this community.

I’ve never been to a free African-American home as an historic site that wasn’t famous or a slave. Very interesting to see and about time. (Logan 1991: 10–11)

One realisation that came as a result of reading these questionnaires is how knowledge of the African-American past is absent from most people’s understanding of history. These responses suggest that visitors incorporated at least some of the exhibit’s empirical information on African-American history.

Answers to the question “What would you like to see in future exhibits?” led to a diverse range of recommendations.

More artifacts from residences . . . records of work life.

Show successes of blacks from 1700–1900.

Early black literature and other cultural finds.

Types of clothing, currency, pictorials of a typical family.

Things they did for entertainment. More info about African-American life. (Logan 1991: 12–13)

These responses make it clear that people realise how little they know about the African-American past and that they will take advantage of opportunities to learn more. Evaluations of this exhibit argue that it was a success in promoting some consciousness of African-American heritage. They also point out that there has been a long-standing demand for more information about African-American history (and minority groups in general) that has not been satisfied.

Conclusion

We achieved some goals and not others. The archaeologists certainly have learned how to be archaeologists within a living community’s needs. There are some new archaeological questions and answers, and we are serving archaeological needs and community concerns in new ways. White archaeologists have felt useful, innovative, and participatory about the focus of their work. African Americans have felt better served but also felt the need for more exhibits, colloquia, workshops, and contacts of all kinds. The demand to know about and contribute more information on black heritage was substantial.

Was consciousness changed through the use of Habermas in the context of African American historical archaeology? Yes, at some level, for most who participated. If the evaluations tell a truth, then certainly awareness of a new source of African American heritage occurred. Among archaeologists there is a sense of greater understanding of African American culture, but little truer understanding of what it is like to be black, or how difficult it was or is. But there is the beginning of an understanding of what American culture does to black people and that many black people do see American society with very different, sharper, and both angrier and more tolerant eyes. So, some white eyes are more open. And some black eyes have a better understanding of “why they are here now.”

I want to move to our work on African spirit practices, which began at the same time as this exhibit and these requests but matured afterward. I have chosen not to reprint any of the archaeology on African materials here because they are so recent and plentifully published (Leone and Fry 1999; Leone, Fry, and Ruppel 2001; Ruppel, Neuwirth, and Fry 2003; Leone 2005). All the scholarly work is readily available, and so is the science news. Even so, it was the discovery between 1990 and 2008 of a series of buried bundles, which we called “archaeological caches,” that allowed a substantial commentary on what was left from Africa and thus, ideology. The bundles normally contained 30 to 100 items, including pins, nails, white buttons, pebbles, sometimes crystals, shells, rings, and coins. All were buried in houses in Annapolis: in northeast corners, under doorsteps, or beneath hearths. They dated from 1700 to 1920. Such bundles are considered part of hoodoo, or conjure, and were, and are, still called in the community that uses them “mojos,” “hands,” “tobys,” or “fixin’s.” The most important of the bundles we discovered dated to 1700–1740, was used in public, and was African, not an African American amalgam.

Our major source of ethnographic understanding of West African spirit practices and their bundles came at the suggestion of my colleague Gladys-Marie Fry, who directed our comprehensive search of the Slave Narratives (Hyatt 1965, 1970–1978; Rawick 1972, 1977, 1979), also called Autobiographies, which gave an enormous amount of direct information on the bundles. From this written resource we established the reasoning behind the use of the bundles and their specific purposes. Within the Slave Autobiographies is the context of slave religion. And it is this large commentary on slave life through most of the United States that we see the critique of American society that Habermas predicts will be found when searching at the margins of mainline capitalist society. That critique parallels the work of Frederick Douglass.

The move to Africa, African American religion, and the Narratives took me and my students out of the fire of the Annapolis history police. They didn’t care about minority archaeology in 1990. They didn’t think anything could be found from Africa and were not concerned with people who had no built, public history for them to control.

https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315431215/7f73df02-7d05-484c-af2f-f2dc2561f5a4/content/fig22_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Cache from the northeast corner of one of the eleven basement rooms of the Charles Carroll house in Annapolis. The cache was the centerpiece of the second of five archaeological exhibits at the Banneker-Douglass Museum, organized by its staff. The cache dates from 1790 to 1820, using dated coins found in it. After 15 years of research and comparative scholarship, as well as more finds like this in Annapolis, we know that the purpose of the caches was to control the passage of spirits of the dead for human purposes. Charles Carroll’s enslaved cook lived in the basement kitchen complex. Photo courtesy of Archaeology in Annapolis.

Further, even though the bundles were all found within the Historic District of the city, we had, simultaneously, moved our excavations out into Eastport and Parole. These two parts of Annapolis were Civil War–era settlements near Annapolis. Each was founded just after the Civil War and remained independent communities until the 1950s, when each became a political subdivision of Annapolis. Eastport was founded as a place for black and white homeowners in 1868, and Parole was an all-black community until recently. Neither was controlled by the Historic Preservation Commission because neither was considered important historically. In the case of Eastport, many homeowners realized how fossilizing the control of the Historic Preservation Commission was and resisted its reach.

https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315431215/7f73df02-7d05-484c-af2f-f2dc2561f5a4/content/fig23_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Two images of the Charles Carroll House in Annapolis. The first (top) is a modern image of the waterfront of the house, showing entries on the basement level used by Carroll family slaves. The house has five levels; here the east section has been demolished. The second image (below) of the Carroll House shows Redemptorist priests in the original Carroll garden, the water side of the house, with the garden now a Romantic-style park, food production space, and vineyard. Photos courtesy of the Charles Carroll House Foundation.

Two important results came with the archaeology of West African spirit practices and their bundles. The religion shows how people escape, maintain integrity, and survive with their self-interest intact. The religion contains not only elements of an African past associated with freedom, but also an effective religious experience in the United States completely apart from mainstream life with its calculated status of permanent inferiority. Second, the Slave Autobiographies contain thousands of pages of firsthand descriptions of life in slavery and the search for profit made off the work and lives of others. In them, we can see the diasporic religion that offered a sense of alternatives while it unified people of African descent and became an African American creation, at the same time that we can read a critique of American slavery and racism.

https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315431215/7f73df02-7d05-484c-af2f-f2dc2561f5a4/content/fig24_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Shiplap House (right) is a new name provided during reclamation by the Historic Annapolis Foundation. This early twentieth-century view of the heart of the city shows nineteenth-century worker housing usually built for whites. Annapolis was segregated, but blacks and whites lived close to each other in cheaply built, lookalike rental units like those in this photograph. The archaeology of such neighborhoods was the subject of exhibits at the Banneker-Douglass Museum. Photo courtesy of Historic Annapolis Foundation.

Because I understood that my use of Althusser and Lukacs did not lead to change in Annapolis society, I turned to Habermas when the local African American community turned to archaeology. We dug, we opened excavations, we taught, exhibited, collaborated, taught archaeology to young African American children, published scientific pieces widely, used The New York Times, The Washington Post, radio, and even streaming video on the Smithsonian Institution’s website (https://anacostia.si.edu/Online_Academy/Academy/academy.htm" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://anacostia.si.edu/Online_Academy/Academy/academy.htm > Scholars > scroll to Maisha Washington)—and we succeeded. We succeeded in two ways. We brought African America to the white world, which, largely, wanted to know much more about black American culture. And we discovered, helped explain, and taught African American culture to many African Americans. Some wanted a sympathetic archaeology, some a celebration, some validation for what they already knew, and some wanted company, recognition, or a foil against which to get angry. We did all this, but above all, we taught and learned that while capitalism produces a vicious society, freedom is based on hope, and hope always escapes control. And that is what African religion alive in America taught us and why Habermas provides a chance of finding a way around capitalism.

https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315431215/7f73df02-7d05-484c-af2f-f2dc2561f5a4/content/fig25_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> This was the appearance of downtown Annapolis in the 1950s. This and the previous image are of 1720s Shiplap House, occupied by at least three families of African Americans and provided with no indoor plumbing. Although the house was restored by the Historic Annapolis Foundation and is now the headquarters of the preservation effort, the reclamation work that was carried on throughout the center of the city left few African Americans in place. Photo courtesy of Historic Annapolis Foundation.