Once you see them, you can’t not see them. That is the case with fingerprints preserved in locally produced bricks, a signature of the people who made them from local clay, for houses, storefronts, and fortifications. Still other skilled artisans, often enslaved, constructed the houses, storefronts, and fortifications of Charleston from these bricks. It was Joe McGill, founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, that first raised awareness of this “signature” of the laborers, mostly enslaved Africans, who toiled in the clay pits and near the kilns on plantations, producing bricks as a winter product. This simple, inadvertent signature of unfree labor preserved in brick samples in the Museum’s history and archaeology collections and in the walls of its historic houses prompted Museum staff to name bricks with finger impressions among our top ten artifacts.