archaeology.org 13
HISTORY IN THE DNA
A
n early nineteenth-century clay pipestem, one of
many unearthed in the slave quarters at the former
Belvoir tobacco plantation on Maryland’s
Chesapeake Bay, has allowed archaeologists
to rescue a lost history. DNA yielded by the
seemingly unremarkable artifact has enabled
them to determine that the pipe
was used by a woman closely
related to the Mende people
of present-day Sierra Leone.
This is a new way to connect
an individual to an artifact she
once used, says Julie Schablitsky, project
director and chief archaeologist with the
Maryland Department of Transportation. “You
have this small, common object, and all of sudden
this new world opens up and there is a whole person behind
it,” she says. “It starts to take us back to the beginning, backto West Africa, where her story began.”
The ability to find such stories is vital to
descendants of enslaved people hungry for infor-
mation about their families’ pasts, especially in
the absence of manumission records,
wills, or possessions. “The descen-
dants ask me, ‘Can you connect
me to this space? Can you say
that my ancestors were here?’”
says Schablitsky. “It’s so hard to learn
anything personal about these
enslaved people, but information
about gender and place of origin
such as we learned from the pipestem
provides a kind of personal validation
for their descendants. It allows to them
to say, ‘We survived.’”
Clay pipestems — jarrett a. LoBeLLPhoto:L’AnseauxMeadows©NewfoundlandandLabradorTourismTherichanddiversehumanhistoryofthisplace
isunlikeanywhereelseintheworld.Thisiswhere
EastmetWest,whentwostreamsofhumanity
cameface-to-faceatL’AnseauxMeadowsaround
AD 1000 ,attheonlyconfirmedNorsesiteinthe
NewWorld.WWeinviteyoutotracethestepsof 9000 yearsof
IndigenousandEuropeanexplorersandsettlers
asyoudriveacrossNewfoundlandandintothe
southcoastofLabrador.Discover Newfoundland & Labrador
CALL 1 800 567 6666 MAXXIMVACATIONS.COM