The Archaeology of Early African American Communities in Talbot County, Eastern Shore, Maryland, USA, and Their Relationship to Slavery

A mid-19th-century deposit of circles and a wheel at Wye House on Maryland's Eastern Shore may link the West African cosmogram to conversion to Christianity through the Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal churches, which use the symbol of the wheel as representation of the movement to God. This interpretation would allow additional understanding of how enslaved and free Africans embraced new forms of Christianity. Creativity within slavery leads us to propose a way in which to write a new history of the Chesapeake region of Maryland. We also introduce M. I. Finley's and Orlando Patterson's ideas on the general conditions leading to and existing within slavery, so that we can consider how slavery appears, and dies in antiquity, and then reappears in North America. We propose a comparative definition of slavery that includes trafficking in human persons. We historical archaeologists can see a condition of society, that is part of our present, that recognizes the brutalizing dynamic within slavery and that can give way to creativity.