African Burial Ground Project: paradigm for cooperation?

Abstract

The eighteenth‐century African Burial Ground in New York City began as a municipal cemetery in which the remains of 15,000 enslaved Africans were buried. It was abandoned to urban development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rediscovered at the turn of the twenty‐first, its location in the heart of downtown Manhattan becoming the site of extraordinary religious, political and scientific conflict and collaboration. The site went from desecration in 1991 to becoming a US National Monument in 2007, representing a successful example of bioarchaeology in the service of a descendant community’s human rights struggle. This article suggests lessons from that struggle and points to the ethical and epistemic value of publicly engaged anthropology.