Archaeologists made a curious find during recent excavations at St. Mary’s, a colonial settlement in Maryland.

One of the participants in a dig unearthed “a rare 370-year-old Spanish cross that had likely been made in the pilgrimage city of Caravaca, Spain, around 1650 and had made its way 4,000 miles to a meadow in southern Maryland.”

Image: The Washington Post.

The history of this particular cross is unknown, but it presumably belonged to one of the English Catholics who settled in early modern Maryland. The Washington Post explains that “Maryland’s original 150 colonists, including many English Catholics fleeing Protestant persecution, had arrived at St. Mary’s on two ships, the Ark and the Dove, in late March 1634.”

Religion and empire were closely intertwined in the early modern American colonies, and archaeological excavations continue to reveal new dimensions of religious practices and material culture from the early modern period.

The Washington Post reports on the excavations in Maryland.