Gold and Glass: African Expressions of Creation aboard the Slave Ship La Concorde

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Telling a Tale of One Ship with Two Names: Queen Anne’s Revenge and La Concorde" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Amongst the artifact assemblage of the early 18th century slave ship La Concorde, housed in the North Carolina Conservation laboratory on East Carolina University campus, are a gold jewelry item and worked glass bottle fragments. Preliminary research suggests that the gold may be of Akan origins where both men and women wore gender specific jewelry on their necks, heads, wrists, knees and elbows blending art and social philosophy. Glass fragments, while useful as maritime cutting and smoothing tools, were also used to for African hair styling and scarification denoting ethnicity or social status. The study also addresses challenging questions about the social context of these artifacts aboard this particular slave ship, captured and reused as a Blackbeard’s (Edward Teach c. 1680-1718) pirate ship Queen Anne’s Revenge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Telling a Tale of One Ship with Two Names: Queen Anne’s Revenge and La Concorde   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 363