Mark J. Price: What on earth is this thing?
What in the world?
North Hill resident William Carpenter would like some help identifying an object he dug up in his backyard on North Howard Street.
He contacted us after Beacon Journal readers solved the mystery of a strange brick that a Tallmadge woman had unearthed 20 years ago.
“I saw the article you ran on the lady's rock she dug up in her backyard,” he wrote. “I dug this up several years ago in my backyard. Can you find out anything about it? Thanks.”
Accompanying the note was a photo of a bug-eyed, leering idol with crooked teeth.
It’s awfully weird — at least for Akron.
At first glance, it appears to be an ancient relic from somewhere far away.
Carpenter, who turns 70 this month, grew up in the colonial-style home, which is more than 100 years old. He was in the fifth grade when his parents, William and Jean Carpenter, bought the house in the early 1960s.
He was digging in the yard to put in a garden about 15 years ago when he found the object at least a foot down. Carpenter said it’s about 3 by 5 inches and appears to have been carved from “some sort of rock,” possibly sandstone.
When we first saw the idol, our first thought was Aztec. Perhaps an earlier resident of the North Howard dwelling had found the object at ancient ruins during a Mexican vacation and brought it home as a souvenir.
Through city directories, census data, newspaper articles and plat maps, we were able to identify previous owners of the property.
Akron Hardware & Floor Co. executive Leo I. Long and his wife, Clara, bought the home in 1907 when it was new and lived there about five years.
C.H. Yeager store secretary Oscar Smith and his wife, Anna, resided at the address from 1912 until about 1927.
Goodrich worker Frank Nicholson and his wife, Eva, called it home for a few years in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Roadway Express depot agent Clinton R. Jordan and his wife, Bernice, moved in about 1934 and stayed for a decade.
Retired laborer Saverio Insalago and his wife, Carrie, owned the home from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s.
Babcock & Wilcox worker Sonnino Panetta and his wife, Maria, lived there from 1959 to 1960.
Some Catholics believe that burying a statue of St. Joseph in the ground will help sell a house faster, but this relic clearly isn’t the patron saint of home and family.
We sent a few queries to archaeology experts around the country to see if they could identify the idol. An Arizona professor told us he couldn’t say for sure, but it looks like a category of objects made in Mexico today to sell to tourists.
“It does not look anything like indigenous art from Ohio!” he wrote.
So it’s just a mass-produced trinket? We couldn’t find any identical objects on internet auction sites. Maybe it isn’t Aztec.
Another possibility would be the Taino, the indigenous people who inhabited present-day Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and the Bahamas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
According to historians, Tainos carved idols called “zemi,” which represented ancestral spirits or deities.
“Depending on their shape and whether or not they were representations of gods or spirits, each zemi had different powers that ranged from promoting successful childbirth to guaranteeing success in war or enhancing agricultural fertility,” author Nicholas J. Saunders wrote in “The Peoples of the Caribbean: An Encyclopedia of Archaeology and Traditional Culture” (2005).
Some Tainos buried idols in soil with the belief that the objects would grow crops.
The reason we mention this is because the North Howard Street home had another resident not included on the list.
Professional landscaper Angel Santiago, a native of Puerto Rico, lived a year or two at the Akron residence in the early 1960s before the Carpenter family moved there. Did he bury an idol in a garden as a nod to the ancient custom? Sadly, we can’t ask him because he passed away in 1976 at age 42.
It’s entirely possible that the landscaper had nothing to do with the unearthed object, but it’s an interesting idea and we are feeling totally baffled.
If you have a better theory, we would love to hear it.
What is that thing?
There’s more to say
Readers continue to respond to our recent columns about local idioms.
Therese Mezzacapo pointed out a curious speaking pattern that she’s heard around town.
“Instead of ‘Where is my coat?’, an Akronite might very possibly say, ‘Where is my coat at?’
“I never really noticed it until a visiting comedian did a whole monologue about it at Hilarities Comedy Club back in the day,” she wrote.
Oh, gosh. I’m guilty of this one. Especially: “Where are you at?” or “Where is it at?”
Stow resident James Diendl swears he’s not a member of the grammar police, but he just had to share a pet peeve.
“I have been following your recent columns on the proper grammatical usage of the prepositions ‘on’ and ‘in’ and they have led me, actually compelled me, to bring out my biggest cringeworthy grammatical usage, or more properly, in my view, misusage,” he wrote. “That is, for example, when one says: ‘I have been waiting on him for an hour,’ when, in fact, that person means, ‘I have been waiting an hour for him.’ The use of ‘waiting on him’ would mean to me that one is serving him something for an hour.”
It really gets complicated when you’re waiting on a waiter, James.
Mary Bucey said her children spent a lot of their youth in Massillon. Consequently, she has heard them ask friends: “Are you allowed goin’?”
“The odd thing about these regional expressions is that we understand them!” she wrote.
Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com
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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Ancient-looking artifact dug up in Akron backyard
