Artifacts recovered from five separate caches contained within two rooms of the East Wing of the Brice House. Within the complex spirit practices, literally anything in the imagination of the practitioner can be used to create charms in a way that seeks to symbolize the politics of everyday life. Usually these charms came in the form of small cloth bundles, filled bottles, or strategically placed, tightly knit discrete deposits made up of everyday items.
Relatively extensive deposits of objects had been deliberately placed beneath individual bricks of the floor. Material was buried next to doorways and in the northeast corner of the south room, the laundry. Material found on the southern side of the central doorway include a black polished stone, a piece of red cotton fabric, a tree root, a colorless molded bottle filled with soil and a single seed, two four-hole buttons, a wooden disk, and a match stick. The northern side of the central doorway was marked with a pierced coin. In the northeast corner of the southern room, a fragment of a jack knife with an inlayed brass shield on the handle, a large black glass bead, two buttons, and a mammal rib fragment were uncovered. In front of the heart in the north room were porcelain doll parts, white buttons, and a fragment of wood. In front of the hearth in the south room were a number of white feathers.
The burying of objects at points of access, such as doorways, windows and fireplaces has several implications, the two most common of which are, to deny access to witches and spirits or to cause harm to a person passing the concealed object.
