ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, MD — A 200-year-old tobacco pipe found in stone slave quarters at the Belvoir plantation on Maryland Highway 178 offered more than just an artifact: It had DNA scientists used to find the origin of the person who had smoked it. It turned out to belong to a person whose ancestry traced back to Sierra Leone.
“When Africans stepped on those slave ships, they lost not only their freedom but their identity,” said Dr. Julie Schablitsky, chief archaeologist of the Maryland Department of Transportation’s State Highway Administration.
As the SHA sought to learn more about the history of the area around MD 178, they performed an archaeological dig on 200-year-old slave quarters. They found thousands of artifacts like broken dishes, animal bones and clay tobacco pipes.
Schablitsky sent four tobacco pipe stems for DNA analysis to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Modern technology allowed scientists to determine the DNA is of the Mende people, one of the largest groups in Sierra Leone.
“This is one way archaeologists can help descendants reclaim their heritage,” Schablitsky said in a news release.
She hoped to connect the DNA with living descendants.
“We usually study ancient human skeletal remains, so having the opportunity to recover [ancient DNA] from tobacco pipes a few hundred years old was a unique challenge,” Dr. Ripan Malhi, who runs the ancient DNA lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in the release.
Malhi and Dr. Kelsey Witt Dillon identified the DNA as belonging to a woman, but it was too downgraded to connect to any living descendants.
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The results of the scientists’ efforts was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
“This is the first time scientists have lifted human DNA from a 200-year-old pipe stem and connected it with a person’s ancestry,” Dr. Hannes Schroeder of the University of Copenhagen said in the release
“The people in Sierra Leone are remarkable and resilient,” Pamela Brogden, whose ancestors were enslaved at Belvoir, said in the release. “To possibly have their blood flowing through us is an honor.”