The Brice House

Click here to view artifacts from the Brice House

The International Masonry Institute, a part of the International Bricklayers’ Union, owns Brice House. It is also under the stewardship of Historic Annapolis Foundation, which provides strong care for one of the preeminent 18th century houses in the city.

Members of Archaeology in Annapolis have excavated all around the building perimeter as well as many places inside this great building. In the east wing of this house, the servants, both enslaved and free, worked in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The east wing was the kitchen and laundry. Beneath the floors we found evidence of the survival of African religion, attuned to American use. We came to call our discovery a cosmogram which is currently on display at the Banneker-Douglass Museum.

To the right is an image of the east wing of the Brice House. The circles mark locations where caches were found. The dashed line is a representation of the invisible cosmogram which defined a sacred space within the house.

The Brice house artifacts represent the physical remains of African American spiritual practices that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries, commonly known as Hoodoo. Hoodoo, like other diasporic African spiritual beliefs such as Vodun or Santeria, combined African ethnic beliefs with elements of Christianity and Islam. In the late 19th century, Hoodoo spread across the United States wherever African Americans moved after emancipation. Early to mid-20th century descriptions of African American Hoodoo are similar across the South. These descriptions refer consistently to the use of doll parts, pins, pierced coins, and bottles placed beneath steps, to guarantee healing, safeguarding, or bewitching.

brice_cosmogram


Brice House has clusters of artifacts beneath the floors of the east wing that are the physical remains of African American religious activity. The cosmogram was built and maintained over 40 years, probably by one person. The clusters mark sacred, protected, and magical spaces. Tracing images on the ground has a long history within BaKongo tradition, from West Africa. The material in the Brice House created an interior landscape with spiritual significance in an African tradition.


With this material, we see evidence that Brice has an African heritage as well as a European heritage, in one place, like most of Annapolis.


Artifacts from the Brice House

toroise shell

This carved tortoise shell was found in a cache located at the base of a lightning rod in the yard of the Brice House. This cache, like the cosmogram found in the East Wing of the Brice House, is also related to West African spiritual practices.

Pierced one cent coin recovered from one of the five separate caches found in the East Wing of the Brice House. The use of pierced coins is possibly the most-documented of all Hoodoo charms. This charm, which is often worn around the ankle or neck, is meant to bring luck or cure a number of maladies. The burial of a pierced coin is not documented as widely, but the coin does lend veracity to the claims of these items being intentionally buried caches.

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This website updated and maintained by Jessica Mundt, M.A.A. candidate, University of Maryland, College Park.

Email us at seekingliberty@gmail.com or call the Banneker-Douglass Museum at (410) 216-6180.