Remembering Africa Under the Eaves
A forgotten room in a Brooklyn farmhouse bears witness to the spiritual lives of slaves.
By H. Arthur Bankoff PhD, Christopher Ricciardi, Ph.D., and Alyssa Loorya, Ph.D., for Archeology Magazine (May/June 2021)
In the late 1990s, the Brooklyn College Summer Archaeological Field School began a long-term archaeological project at the Lott House. Over several years, the Field School discovered over 65,000 artifacts and former structures that represent the Lott family, enslaved persons and their descendants, and immigrant workers at the Lott House. Today, Dr. Loorya is the President of Friends of the Lott House, spearheading efforts to open the historic farmhouse as a museum.
Below is an excerpt from Remembering African Under the Eaves. Click here to read the entire article.
For three years, we have investigated the ways in which the Lotts responded to their changing landscape, excavating around the house, examining the structure itself, perusing archives, and tracking down Lott descendants. A privy revealed dolls, pipes, a gold pocket watch, and the upper plate of a woman's false teeth. We recovered endless quantities of clam and oyster shells and ceramics. Through it all, one question haunted us. During the eighteenth century, according to census data, the Lotts owned more slaves than most other families in the town of Flatlands, now Marine Park. We had found no direct evidence of where -or how- those slaves might have lived.
Finally, this past winter, we found it: a forgotten room that would reveal key evidence of the persistence of African religious rituals among slaves in New York- the only evidence for it, in fact, beyond the eighteenth-century African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan where some graves reflected continued adherence to such ritual symbols and traditions. It is unusual to uncover in New York City undisturbed archaeological deposits that date prior to the turn of the nineteenth century. The urbanization that has changed the face of this metropolis since the mid - nineteenth century has obliterated evidence of slave life, whereas on the large plantations in the rural South, slaves were typically housed in separate quarters whose archaeological remains still exist today.
We stooped to explore the four-foot-high space. Re-used boards, some with bits of wallpaper from a former incarnation, make up the floor, secured in place by rose-headed square cut nails, suggesting pre- or early-nineteenth century construction. Candle drippings speckle the floorboards by the stairs. The room to the left has a chimney slathered with mortar to seal a hole-apparently once a beehive-shaped oven to heat the room or warm food. Dark soot stains are still visible on the brick. On the floor we found a door-a perfect fit to the doorway-with a rectangle cut out, most likely for ventilation. The room to the right of the stairs is slightly smaller, with no source of heat; its door also now lies within the room, a perfect match to the room's doorway. This second door has no cut rectangle. Perhaps without a chimney, this room had no need of ventilation. The third, boarded-up door would have led to a Lott-family bedroom in the adjoining saltbox. We had finally found the living quarters for at least one of the Lotts' slaves. It would have been inhospitable place to live, close and dark without natural light or fresh air; in short, hardly the sort of place one would expect liberal- minded abolitionists to house anybody.
When removing the floorboards in the space, the archaeologists discovered corncobs in the corner of the room between the chimney and the door. It appears they were deliberately laid in the shape of an “X” or a cross. These cobs still had their kernels, meaning they had not been eaten or stripped but dried whole. Their deliberate placement suggested a ritual association. An "X" is a commonly seen symbol on objects used for ritual purposes by the enslaved. It is West African in origin and known as the Bokongo cosmogram, representing the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the deceased.
