<< Re: Pierced Coins, Buttons, and John Canoe Festivals >>
I tried to post this yesterday, but it didn't work for some reason...
This is a compendium of the responses received on pierced coins. Some of them
came to me off list, and I assume they were not generally distributed. The
names have been changed to protect the shy:
#1) I wouldn't jump too quickly to the assumption that perforated coins mean
Africanisms. I recovered a similarly perforated 1864 American two-cent
piece from a house ruin at Fayette, Michigan. This 1867-1891 company town
supported a substantial iron-smelting operation and had, so far as I can
tell, no African-American residents. Other coins in the same ruin include
an 1865 Indianhead cent, an 1868 nickel, an 1865 10 centime copper from
Luxembourg, and an 1861 5 centime copper from France, none of the latter
coins perforated. Most evidence points to this house being occupied by
recent European immigrant families who made up the bulk of the unskilled
laboring population, the segment of the local society that lived in this
neighborhood of very modest cabins.
Pat
#2)
Pierced coins have been recovered from a few slave cabin contexts on at
least four sites here in Middle Tennessee. I believe the Hermitage
excavations also yielded pierced coins from slave cabin contexts. I
personally have excavated a pierced 1790s Spanish half-reale from the
remains of a slave cabin on an early farmstead occupied by a migrating
Virginia family and slaves from the mid 1780s to the 1830s.
Dan
#3) Such pierced coins are not endemic to the South. I've seen several
examples from archaeologial contexts in Vermont and Maine. My
grandmother passed on a few to me at one time--Indian Head Pennies if I
remember correctly. Since I was into coin collecting, I remember being
very annoyed that someone had punched a hole in them. The oldest one I
actually have is a copper political coin, about the size of a large
penny, that dates to Andrew Jackson's campaign for president--clearly an
old phenomenon.
Peter
#4)
I got one pierced white metal (silver?) coin at the Mann-Simons cottage.
Context wasn't great, but I'd guess late 19th c., though a lot of the earlier
material at the site had been redeposited. The site was occupied by a free
black family at least by 1850 and probably as early as the 1830s. The brief
background work I did resulted in:
Pierced coins have been found in a variety of African American contexts: in
Georgia slave cabins (Adams 1987), in a late 19th to early 20th century
cemetery (Rose and Santeford 1985), at Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia
(Singleton 1991), and at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana (Wilkie 1995). Coins
functioned as charms to ward off evil (Adams 1987:204), and could be secured
around the neck, waist or ankle (Puckett 1926), or worn in the toe of a shoe
(Cohn 1935). An ex-slave from Orangeburg, South Carolina, Lorenzo Ezell,
reported that "De old folks wears ... a silver dime on a fishin' string to
keep off the witches" (in Yetman 1970:115-116, see also Genovese 1972:223).
They were used in various medicinal ways as well, for example to aid teething
babies (Puckett 1926). Of particular interest, the coin chosen as a charm
was sometimes selected because it dated to the wearer's birth year.
Unfortunately, the date on the pierced coin from the Mann-Simons Cottage is
unreadable.
Adams, William Hampton
1987 Historical Archaeology of Plantations at Kings Bay, Camden County,
Georgia Reports of Investigation 5, Department of Anthropology, University of
Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Rose, Jerome C., and Lawrence Gene Santeford
1985 "Burial Descriptions" in Gone to a Better Land (Jerome C. Rose, ed.)
pp. 38-130, Research Series 25, Arkansas Archeological Survey, Fayetteville,
AR.
Singleton, Theresa A.
1991 "The Archaeology of Slave Life" in Before Freedom Came (Edward D.C.
Campbell, Jr. and Kym S. Rice, eds.) pp. 176-191, University Press of
Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Wilkie, Laurie A.
1995 "Magic and Empowerment on the Plantation: An Archaeological
Consideration of the African-American World View" Southeastern Archaeology
14(2):136-148.
Puckett, Newbell Niles
1926 Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, NC.
Cohn, Davis L.
1935 God Shakes Creation Harper and Brothers, New York, NY.
Genovese, Eugene D.
1972 Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made Vintage Books, New York,
NY.
Yetman, Norman R.
1970 Life under the "Peculiar Institution", Selections from the Slave
Narrative Collection Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, NY.
Chris C
5) I think we found a pierced coin with lots of wear on one side at the
Brush-Everard site in Colonial Williamsburg. It was a field school in 87
and 88. You might try to contact the folks at Colonial Williamsburg for
more info.
Chris M
6) Pierced coins are fairly common in the Pacific Northwest from the late
18th century up at least to the 1860s or so. I don't recall pierced buttons,
but they may well exist. They were used as ornaments. Some are US coins,
many are foreign, especially Spanish colonial. I don't know of common finds
in the late 19th or 20th centuries, but others may.
Bob K
7) There is a festival held in Cape town South Africa every year with the
unfortunate name of "Coon festival" It is almost like a cross between a
minstrel show and carnival. People of both european and african decent
participate in either masks or black face. Now i may be grasping at straws
but to the non linguist Kooning sure sounds Dutch. Any Dutch in your neck
of the woods? I don't know much about the "coon festival" but you can read
about it in most travel guides.
Eric D
8) Whether relevant or not - you decide. Pierced pennies and other coins of
the realm were worn during the War Between the States by northern states to
show sympathy for the southern cause. The people doing this were called
'copperheads.'
Stephen A
9) Out here on the Plains we often find piereced silver coins inNative
American
contexts. The earliest I've seen are silver with the likeness of Charles II
of Spain. One current interpretationholds that they're French trade goods.
John D
10)
I suppose you know that John Canoe or Junkannoo or similarly named
festivals are still held annually throughout the West Indies. And
pierced coins have turned up in numerous slave- and free-black sites in
Virgnia. I know I have them from quite a few sites. I have also heard a
number of papers given at various meetings where such things are
discussed and there have been a variety of speculations about their use
and meaning. Wearing pierced coins is still practiced in some places in
the south, I believe. One instance I know of is pierced dimes worn on
anklets by some African-American women in Louisiana. Someone --not sure
who (maybe Wilke??)--spoke of similar things as being used to attract a
spirit, but I have heard of similar charms used in Virginia by young
women to attract a man.
--
Dan M
11) We found one pierced coin in a slave cabin context in Mt. Pleasant,
SC--1793
Spanish 1 reale. Bill Adams recorded similar finds at one of the Kings Bay
sites in coastal GA--he had archival citations indicating they were charms
to ward off witches. We also found a pierced 1856 U.S. half-dime here in
Gainesville, FL--context possibly a slave cabin site.
Lucy W
12) Excavations in a turn-of-the-20th century gold mining settlement above the
Arctic Circle in central interior Alaska recovered a pierced U.S. quarter,
presumably part of a costume or pendant. Additional information is
available to those who are interested.
Robin M
13) So-called "Abolitionist coinage" was also in circulation in the North,
recovered from the "PSA 4 Site" (Grossman, et al.) in Lower Manhattan during
the "War between the States." Apparently, the intent was to cause "pause" to
reflect while in the transaction of money for goods and services to the
plight of those enslaved. I suppose it also serve a certain "nuisance value"
in that you always had to check your change carefully to see if you were
receiving it or carrying it. New York was always a place of alternative
coinage however, and maybe that coinage was competing with so-called "bar
tokens." The few pieces found there, in a large unmortared cistern under a
tailors shop, were not pierced, if my memory serves me.
George M
14) We recovered a pierced 1854 dime from one of the burials within the
African
American Sam Goode Cemetery in southern Virginia. I mentioned its discovery
to Eric Duff with the Georgia DOT, and Eric advised me that he had recovered a
number of pierced coins in agricultural fields during surveys in Mississippi
and had been told that it was an African American custom to wear an anklet of
pierced coins to make noise and scare off snakes. Pierced metal buttons would
have had the same effect.
J. W. (Joe) J, PhD,
15) <<Common Objects Are an Uncommon Find.url>>
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/16/176l-021600-idx.html
I got this off of the Anthropology in the News website at Texas A&M. But I
figured it applied to your pierced coin inquiry. You might get more our of
Mark Leone at Maryland. He's usually forthcoming.
John D
16) We recovered an 1836 American penny with three holes pierced in it at the
American Millwright's House at Mill Creek State Historic Park (4 miles
outside Mackinaw City, Michigan). The house dates to roughly 1820-1840.
Numerous trade goods were found at the house, and there was a large metis
population in the area at the time.
Lynn E
>>>Thanks folks. Check the page again if you are curious:
http://Encore-net.com/Diachronic
Carl Steen
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