Excavating Magic

The process of locating and evaluating the chosen archaeological sites for this work is presented here as a prelude to the analysis of any artifacts with potential for magical interpretation. Issues of archaeological recordation and site formation processes are discussed to explain the paucity of the chosen site type. Five New England sites met the appropriate criteria for consideration: Chadbourne site, John Alden site, Jireh Bull Garrison House, Greene Farm Archaeology Project, and John Howland House site. Each site’s history and any potential magical symbolism and artifacts are discussed. Additionally, two common types of archaeologically recovered intentionally concealed objects (witch bottles and shoes) are discussed to question why examples were not located at the five sites reviewed here.

Motivations, Expectations, and Tribulations

Beginning with a brief explanation of British geographical origins and circumstances, this chapter proceeds to explain the motivations, expectations, and tribulations that contributed to the Puritan colonists’ overall experience as one of heightened anxiety and fearfulness. Looking at the difficulties they faced with the environmental challenges, high mortality rates, fear of darkness and forests, the cultural otherness of the indigenous populations, and their own social and religious conflicts, reveals the numerous crises the colonists had to contend with. To highlight the relationship of gender to the magical mindset and to the tribulations of the colonial experience in New England, Chapter 5 concludes with a discussion of the rigid and explicit delineation and enactment of Puritan gender expectations including speech restrictions.

Traditional Wisdom

The process of locating and evaluating folkloristic data sources is presented here as a prelude to the analysis of the detailed magical references abstracted from those sources. The sources include multiple folklore collections gathered in Britain and New England. These sources provide at times a repetition of information from the historic sources, like the rationale of the Doctrine of Signatures, and in other instances references to beliefs, objects, and practices not noted in any historic documents including ideas about magical plants and some supernatural beings. These examples provide an additional layer of information into who was using magic during this period, why they used it, and how it manifested, specifically the use of gender related magic as a crisis response to a host of perceived dangers.

The Power of Magic

This chapter explores the theories used in this study. Focusing especially on agency and fear theories, this chapter provides an in depth look at what the emotion of fear entails and how it affects human behavior. A common response to fearful situations involves casting anomalous dangers into recognizable creatures. Thus, motivated by their fears and empowered through their actions (agency), one viable resource available to women and men in seventeenth-century New England to protect themselves from these creatures and dangerous situations was the use of magical objects that may be specifically associated with gender activity areas.

Archaeology and Magic

This final chapter revisits the volume’s goals to draw conclusions about apotropaic material culture classification and its archaeological presence, the relationship between gendered fear and apotropaic use, risk management contexts, and boundary construction implications based upon the data abstracted, analyzed, and interpreted through the book. At this point a revised criterion model for recognition of magic and ritual in the historical archaeological record is offered for future researchers as a complementary model to the ritual identification model that is currently available and most referenced by archaeologists attempting to recognize and understand indications of belief in magical power in the archaeological record. Lastly, recommendations are proposed for continuing historical and archaeological investigation of magic including sacred measurement, plants, and symbols as elements revealing gendered behaviors to protect and control their lives.

Archaeology and Gendered Magic

Chapter 1 introduces readers to the necessity of archaeological consideration of belief as a primary driving force behind daily decision making and praxis, while providing a brief history of the archaeology of magic and study of magical beliefs. It defines gender and situates it in relationship to the use of magic in the seventeenth century to create protective barriers. To reveal the traditional beliefs and rationales behind such practices requires knowledge of the folklore of the people under study. Finally, it provides chapter summaries to guide readers through the remainder of the volume.

World View and the Magical Mindset

This chapter establishes the cultural context for this work by first examining the worldview and magical mindset shared by seventeenth-century Christians, explaining how a magical understanding of both the universe and the workings of a Christian deity were culturally logical to New Englanders. It provides a detailed example of the use of numerology, right-left orientation, symbolism, and the Doctrine of Signatures in charms, rituals, and other magical practices to illustrate the complex and embedded nature of religious belief, worldview, and cosmology that inform magical thought and practice.

The Nature of Magic

To ground the study of magic and archaeology in seventeenth-century New England within the broader field of anthropological magical belief scholarship, this chapter provides a general discussion of magic with definitions of sympathetic magic, ritual, magical worldview, and apotropaism. Discussion of boundary and threshold concepts and explanations of how magic is believed to function includes notions of secrecy, conflict, and body-house interfacing. The chapter concludes with comparative cultural examples of gendered magical practices, like the construction of kolams, to substantiate the possibility that magical use could also have had a gendered aspect in New England.

Words from the Past

The process of locating and evaluating historical data sources is presented here as a prelude to the analysis of the detailed magical references abstracted from historic archives. The sources are divided into primary and secondary general historical sources including letters, diaries, magical treatises and compilations, sermons, magical symbolism, and herbal collections and the documentary evidence from the Salem witch trials and other court proceedings. These sources provide the first glimpse into concerns over threshold permeability and the use of gender related magic as a crisis response to protect those domestic boundaries.