The traffic signs of Highway 235 leading to St. Mary’s remember with insistence their destiny: the first European settlement of the American State of Maryland. Along the way there are picturesque farms with horse-drawn carts of the Amish, the “second colonizers”, as they are known around here. St Mary’s is a town of one thousand inhabitants founded in 1634 by the British. Its main tourist attraction is an archaeological site between the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay where the buildings of the seventeenth century have been rebuilt. Last March and after almost a century of searching, archaeologists finally found the underground structure they needed to complete the map described in the historical documents: a fortification the size of a football field.
The underground fort hid pottery made by natives, oyster shell bricks and projectile points, among other things. A jumble of objects that finally gave reason to archaeologists. And then, last October they found a small copper cross with two horizontal bars 350 years old, original from Caravaca de la Cruz, in the northwest of the Spanish region of Murcia. Specialists released the discovery a couple of weeks ago. They still don’t explain how that relic got there.
A few meters from the covered fortification, archaeologist Travis Parno, research director of the Historic St. Mary’s City says her team is not used to finding Catholic vestiges in the English colonies. The cross, about four centimeters long “ “is a very particular, very specific religious object,” he says. “It’s not something we’ve found here before. When it appeared, I was very excited because a religious object as small as this means it was deeply personal to someone.” Parno is more used to finding fragments of buildings and pieces of dishes that you cross.
In the early 1630s, the English settler George Calvert asked King James I for the grant of a land with the intention of creating a refuge for persecuted Irish and English Catholics. Their efforts resulted in the proclamation of the Maryland Tolerance Act, which made the State one of only two British colonies in America where Catholics could practice their faith without reprisals. At the St. Mary’s of the seventeenth century lived with Protestants and Jews, among others. The religious freedom enjoyed by what was then the capital of Maryland (now Annapolis) makes it strange that no more Catholic pieces have been found. So far there is only one record of another Caravaca cross in the State, about 300 years old, discovered in the settlement of Charles Town.
The specialists had been searching for the exact location of Fort St. Mary’s since 1930. The English archaeologist and geophysicist Tim Horsley, who managed to find it thanks to the sophisticated technique of magnetometry, argues that the cross “was clearly a valuable possession” for whoever brought it from England or traded it with some Native American. “It’s something that’s going to be very difficult to explain. Through archaeology we can come up with theories and write suggestions. But we may never know for sure, ” he says over the phone.
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The fame of the virtues of the cross of Caravaca, which was attributed powers of protection against evils —particularly storms and lightning— added to the plenary indulgences granted by Roman Pontiffs to the owners of the object, “generated an important demand for pieces”, according to Indalecio Pozo Martínez, director of the Museum of the Vera Cruz of Caravaca. “That, to a large extent, explains the presence of Caravaca crosses in many places and their appearance in archaeological sites, from Prague to Maryland.”
Parno marries no explanation, but believes that the most likely scenario is that she was taken there by an English Catholic, or a Jesuit missionary. “We know that the Jesuits had strong ties with Spain and that in the early seventeenth century Caravaca crosses were present throughout Europe”” Also in territories of America, and some colonies of the Far East and Africa. Before embarking on the New World, the Italian Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino commissioned the purchase of “30 0 40 dozens of Spanish crosses or Caravacensi” to ” distribute to the natives”, as he recounts in his Epistolary, quoted by Pozo Martínez in an email.
It is planned that the Historic St. Mary’s City opens a new visitor center in 2024, where the religious object will stand out among other valuable artifacts discovered at the fort. They have already collected 100,000 pieces and, according to Parno, they hope to excavate the area for another decade or two. In the site, in which archaeologists have been working for half a century, 6.5 million objects have been found. And they have only combed 5% of their 800 hectares.