Ned:
 
Melanie Cabak at the Savannah River Plant, in South Carolina has done a
fair amount of research on blue beads in African-American contexts.  Rough
to put this together from a plowzone context.  Reply and tell me if I
should forward your address to Melanie.
 
 
 
 
At 07:48 AM 3/1/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Apologies for cross-posting, but this is a fishing expedition.
>
>The Bloomsbury site in Delaware  was occupied roughly from the middle of
>the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Occupants included
>members of the local native American community and others who probably were
>of European descent.
>
>There were no foundation remains, but we found one blue bead in each of
>four plowzone units that appear to be at the corners of the house. Another
>identical blue bead was found in a well.
>
>We have postulated magical significance to the blue beads at house corners,
>but no precedent has been documented on other sites.
>
>There is another possible connection to superstition on the site. Among the
>demolition trash thrown into a well, we found a "Bellarmine" mask face from
>one of three brown stoneware jugs. Terminal date for manufacture of these
>vessels is a half-century before the house was built. So the jugs, and
>certainly the masked example, probably were heirlooms.
>
>Masked brown German stoneware jugs are associated with "witch bottles"
>placed by doorways in America, Iceland, and Britain during the seventeenth
>century.
>
>Could it be that a "witch bottle" was brought from an earlier home by this
>family, or maybe pilfered from a ruined house, or curated by a believer in
>this particular magic?
>
>While we glibly refer to "heirloom" artifacts to explain such chronological
>anomalies, I continue to wonder if this particular find is an example of a
>magical tradition surviving beyond the time of availability of a principal
>object of the "cult."  The wide dispersal of a "cult" associated with a
>particular industrial product is interesting, too.
>
>
>Ned Heite
>         _____            Say what? What was that you called her?
>     ___(_____)           Baby is a LAND ROVER!
>     |Baby the\
>     |1969 Land\__===_    As a matter of fact, I have just
>     |  ___Rover   ___|o  now returned from the funeral of
>     |_/ . \______/ . ||  last fellow who called Baby a J**p
>________\_/________\_/_______________________________________
>Check out our wool camp web page: http://www.dmv.com/~iceland
>