ABOUT THIS PROJECT (Home)CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE PAST
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Levi Jordan
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 Two views of the Curer's Cabin during excavation.
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| Kris Brown graduated from the University of Houston with a Master's Degree in Anthropology a few years ago. She had been involved in excavations and interpretations of Jordan Plantation materials for some time, and co-authored paper on her work at the 1998 Annual Meetings of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Here is the abstract for her paper. | |||
Archaeology and Spirituality: The Conjurer/Midwife and the Praise House/Church at the Levi Jordan Plantation, by Kristine N. Brown and Kenneth L. BrownOver the past decade, the slave and tenant quarters of the Levi Jordan Plantation have been the focus of historical and archaeological investigations. To date, at least fourteen of the original twenty-nine slave and tenant cabins have been investigated. While all of these cabins, and some of the yard space, have yielded artifacts that likely had a ritual function, at least two of the cabins have provided detailed information on religious ritual and belief of a more "community-wide" nature. The first of these is the so-called Conjurer's Cabin [has also been called the "Magician/Curer's Cabin"]. Extensive excavation of this cabin has provided the conjurer's kit, and a set of features that combined to form a Kongo Cosmogram. The second cabin represents a small church, or, more likely, a Praise House. The functions of these cabins have been developed through detailed testing against the ethnographic record of Gullah communities. This paper presents this testing. |
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