Charleston Reporter

Archaeology Magazine named a slave tag, which was found at the College of Charleston, among its top 10 archeological discoveries of 2021.

"I knew what I had been handed pretty instantaneously, and I went into a poker face," Jim Newhard, College of Charleston classical archaeology professor and director of the Center for Historical Landscapes, told The College  Today. "When you find something like this, its discovery needs to be managed. 'It's just another piece of data,' one tells oneself. You keep matters subdued because sensational discoveries can put a site at risk."

Last spring, an 1853 slave tag was discovered at a construction site at the College of Charleston.

"We felt the tag had to be included because it's a reminder of an individual who may otherwise have been lost to time and to the dehumanizing system of enslavement," Marley Brown, associate editor of Archaeology Magazine, told The College Today. "What's more, the fact that the College of Charleston team recovered the object from its archaeological context provides a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the person who may once have worn it -- a real gift, considering many of these tags have no provenance."

Conducted by faculty and student volunteers, the excavation of the site at 63 1/2 Coming Street was part of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy via the South Carolina Energy Office to build a solar pavilion, which required a cultural resource survey of the site prior to construction.

Other Southern cities also had similar labor-for-hire arrangements with enslaved workers, but Charleston is the only city known to produce tags for the enslaved person to wear as a means of documenting the agreement.

"What is uncommon about this discovery is that this object was found in context, unlike many other examples now in the hands of private collectors that have no provenance," Grant Gilmore, associate professor and Addlestone Chair in Historic Preservation, told The College Today.