Rosary

The artifact interred wtih Burial 11 suggests that this individual was unusual. Uncommonly, he was buried with a suite of religious artifacts, many of them very finely made.  Taken with the evidence of birth in Africa (in the modified incisors), the combination of features has made him of particular interest to researchers of the Colonial era in New Orleans.  Shannon Dawdy, for instance, in Building the Devil’s Empire, has suggested that this man could be an “Atlantic Creole” of Kongolese descent whose mixed parentage and trans-cultural fluency enabled him to move through the port cities of the Atlantic world with some fluidity. Due to a series of fortuitous events, the items buried with this man came back to light in 2011 and could be re-examined.