Quartz crystal from ritual cache

myminifactory

This quartz point dates back to an era when American Indians crafted such objects around 3,000 to 6,000 years ago, yet it was unearthed archaeologically from a pit feature linked to a post-Civil War house inhabited by an African American family on what is now Manassas National Battlefield Park. The 1880 census reveals that Philip and Sarah Nash, along with their five children, resided in this house at the time. The pit feature also yielded six unaltered quartz crystals and a fragment of galena, prompting archaeologists to interpret it as a ritual cache similar to African spirit bundles (see Laura Galke's 2000 book "Free Within Ourselves," pages 253-269, in "Archaeological Perspectives on the American Civil War" edited by Clarence R. Geier and Stephen R. Potter, University Press of Florida, Tallahassee). Artifact creation: This artifact was digitized at the National Park Services Museum Resource Center in Lanham, Maryland, utilizing a NextEngine Desktop 3D scanner. The image is courtesy of the National Park Service-National Capital Region, Washington, D.C.