Burial 16
A plausible biography of the individual in Burial #16 would put him as having been born in Central Africa or the Gold Coast in the 1720s, and brought to the Americas as a young man, possibly through the Caribbean. He developed a cultural fluency that would have served him in interactions with maroons and indigenous populations. The pouch containing the pipe and the flints for striking provided a material marker of this fluency, as it could operate in the social spheres of Native and African with equal resonance, blending and serving as a point of conjunction for the two. Based upon the attention given to his burial in New Orleans, this allowed him special status or recognition in Louisiana, whether or not he was still enslaved in life.