African Burial Ground Research Articles

Oral microbial diversity in 18th century African individuals from South Carolina.

As part of the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project, we characterized the oral microbiomes of twelve 18th century African-descended individuals (Ancestors) from Charleston, South Carolina, USA, to study their oral health and diet. We found that their oral microbiome composition resembled that of other historic (18th-19th century) dental calculus samples but differed from that of modern samples,and was not influenced by indicators of oral health and wear observed in the dentition. Phylogenetic analysis of the oral bacteria, Tannerella forsythia and Pseudoramibacter alactolyticus, revealed varied patterns of lineage diversity and replacement in the Americas, with the Ancestors carrying strains similar to historic period Europeans and Africans. Functional profiling of metabolic pathways suggested that the Ancestors consumed a diet low in animal protein. Overall, our study reveals important insights into the oral microbial histories of African-descended individuals, particularly oral health and diet in colonial North American enslavement contexts.

“The Dead Have Been Awakened in the Service of the Living”: Activist Community-Engaged Archaeology in Charleston, South Carolina

AbstractIn 2013, 36 Ancestors of African descent were identified in an unmarked eighteenth-century burial ground during construction in Charleston, South Carolina. The site, later referred to as the Anson Street African Burial Ground, was buried beneath the growing city and forgotten in the centuries that followed. The ethical treatment of these ancestral remains was of paramount importance to our community. Historically, narratives relating to the lives of African descendant people in Charleston have been inadequately documented and shared. For these reasons, we engaged the local African American community in a multifaceted memorialization process. Together, we sought to sensitively ensure that the Ancestors’ identities and lives were fully explored according to the collective descendant community's wishes. To this end, we involved the community in researching and celebrating the Ancestors’ lives through arts and education programs and analyzed their and community members’ DNA to elucidate their ancestry. Our engagement initiatives increased access for all ages to archaeological, historical, and genetic research and encouraged active participation in the design of a permanent memorial. The Anson Street African Burial Ground Project provides a successful example of community-engaged activist archaeology focused on honoring the Ancestors and their descendants.

Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric ed. by Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric ed. by Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet Matthew Teutsch Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric. Edited by Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. viii, 316. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3615-1; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3614-4.) Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet’s Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric has three key components that “[lay] bare the site of the trauma, the resistance, and the healing as symbolic action” through various examinations of space, place, oratory, cultural consumption, and more (p. 8). The three sections of Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric carry the reader through a communicative process, moving from the disruption of nostalgia, to the “decenter[ing] of martyrs” and the creation of “new archetypal identities,” to finding space for interventions (p. 11). The result, the editors write, is “a conversation rooted in a potential for symbolic action and active healing from cycles of aggression and victimization” by critically engaging with the South and positioning its symbols and construction within the global context (p. 11). Overall, Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric provides a wide and engaging series of essays by scholars who define themselves as “insiders” or “outsiders” to the region based on various things such as where they grew up, their gender identity, their race, their political leanings, and more. Having contributors define themselves in this manner strengthens the collection because it provides “evidence [of] the complexity of what it means to be an insider/outsider in the South” and how that complexity challenges the monolithic and hegemonic representations of the South that the essays reconstruct (p. 5). Many of the contributors did not grow up in the South, and for that reason they define themselves as “outsiders”; however, others grew up in the South and still define themselves as having an “‘insider-outsider’ status” because they “occupy a liminal space,” as Cassidy D. Ellis puts it, “that’s ‘southernish’” (p. 162). These positionings bring with them perspectives and paths that one must navigate when pursuing the work of reconstruction. Carolyn Walcott, “a Black, Caribbean-born, female scholar situated in the South,” examines how the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta could be “an important place for connecting Caribbean and African American memory of slavery” and “civil rights struggles,” but she argues it falls short in that attempt (pp. 254, 255). Dave Tell, “a white man from Kansas,” explores how working with the Emmett Till Memorial Commission of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, showed him “that giving back to the community and writing as an outsider are not always competing goals” (p. 49). The contributors, through defining their own positionality to the South as a region that exists metonymically as a symbolic site of trauma and the nation’s sins—and, I would add, global sins—highlight the ways that a region polices itself and the ways that a region never exists as a monolithic space. Regions [End Page 195] change, morph, and reconstruct themselves responding to various stimuli. The contributors highlight this reconstruction throughout their essays, from the queering of the South in Cassidy D. Ellis and Michael L. Forst’s “Songs of the South: Embodying the Crossroads of Southern Narrative Inheritances,” to the confrontation of cultural southern nostalgia and African American and Latinx erasure in Julia M. Medhurst’s “Styles and Spaces of Whiteness in HGTV’s Fixer Upper,” to the reclamation and reparation of space in Megan Fitzmaurice’s “What Lies Beneath: Recovering an African Burial Ground and Black Nationalism’s Cultural Influence in the Capital of the Confederacy.” Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric builds on the previous scholarship of Tara McPherson, Douglas Reichert Powell, and others. However, the editors note that more work needs to occur. While Jason Edward Black’s essay details John Marshall’s rhetoric used to define the southeastern tribes, work needs to be done on the Vietnamese, Filipino, and other Asian communities in Louisiana and the region, on Latinx communities, and on the intersections of Black masculinity, Black queerness, and Native heritage in the region. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric cannot encompass all the work that needs to take place, but, as the editors put it, “the volume...

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

Core issues, case studies, and the need for expanded Legacy African American genomics.

Introduction: Genomic studies of Legacy African Americans have a tangled and convoluted history in western science. In this review paper, core issues affecting African American genomic studies are addressed and two case studies, the New York African Burial Ground and the Gullah Geechee peoples, are presented to highlight the current status of genomic research among Africa Americans. Methods: To investigate our target population's core issues, a metadatabase derived from 22 publicly accessible databases were reviewed, evaluated, and synthesized to identify the core bioethical issues prevalent during the centuries of the African American presence in North America. The sequence of metadatabase development included 5 steps: identification of information, record screening and retention of topic relevant information, identification of eligibility via synthesis for concept identifications, and inclusion of studies used for conceptual summaries and studies used for genetic and genomic summaries. To these data we added our emic perspectives and specific insights from our case studies. Results: Overall, there is a paucity of existing research on underrepresent African American genomic diversity. In every category of genomic testing (i.e., diagnostic, clinical predictive, pharmacogenomic, direct-to-consumer, and tumor testing), African Americans are disproportionately underrepresented compared to European Americans. The first of our case studies is from the New York African Burial Ground Project where genomic studies of grave soil derived aDNA yields insights into the causes of death of 17th and 18th Century African Americans. In the second of our case studies, research among the Gullah Geechee people of the Carolina Lowcountry reveals a connection between genomic studies and health disparities. Discussion: African Americans have historically borne the brunt of the earliest biomedical studies used to generate and refine primitive concepts in genetics. As exploited victims these investigations, African American men, women, and children were subjected to an ethics-free western science. Now that bioethical safeguards have been added, underrepresented and marginalized people who were once the convenient targets of western science, are now excluded from its health-related benefits. Recommendations to enhance the inclusion of African Americans in global genomic databases and clinical trials should include the following: emphasis on the connection of inclusion to advances in precision medicine, emphasis on the relevance of inclusion to fundamental questions in human evolutionary biology, emphasis on the historical relevance of inclusion for Legacy African Americans, emphasis on the ability of inclusion to foster expanded scientific expertise in the target population, ethical engagement with their descendants, and increase the number of science researchers from these communities.

Boneyarn by David Mills

Reviewed by: Boneyarn by David Mills Ilka Scobie (bio) boneyarn David Mills Ashland Poetry Press https://www.ashlandpoetrypress.com/online-catalog/other-books/boneyarn 144 pages; Print, $17.95 Along the city's jawline bythe wharf where a peck of slaveswere auctioned In 1630, one hundred enslaved Africans (one-third of the population) lived in New Amsterdam, soon to be New York City. By 1712 New York was an epicenter of the slave trade, and a cemetery was created for Negroes, enslaved or free, as well as Native Americans and indentured whites. About fifteen thousand bodies were unceremoniously buried there, and it was not until October 1991 that an excavation crew for a new federal building discovered the remains of 419 human skeletons. Thus was the African Burial Ground, the oldest and largest slave cemetery in America, unearthed. "See: all of us / now mothered by mother earth / and murder's milk." With a powerful trifecta of history, lyricism, and empathy, David Mills creates a sweeping poetic vision of this story. Voices of the enslaved Africans explore the fraught complexity, the abuse of power, and slavery's unspeakable horrors. One block from today's New York Stock Exchange a slave market thrived, and more enslaved Africans lived in New York than in any other American city except for the booming slave center of Charleston, South Carolina. Mills delves into a hidden history of pre-Revolutionary New York. Slave rebellions, early African American writers, interracial love affairs, colonial history—all are fodder for his poetic masterpiece. We learn that the kidnapped African-born slaves maintained strong teeth (some of which were sculpted into various shapes, indicating their African birthplace) but their enslaved children were starved on a carbohydrate diet, thus the toothless child corpses. "In the child graves, their teeth were almost always gone. / Cause they were the here born. The start / life. The too-often sugar and corn suppers." [End Page 116] The slaves were often buried with artifacts, buttons, bracelets, and beads, some of which were made in Africa. In the haunting poem "to the Bones; About the Beads: Talking," a forty-year-old woman's skeleton was found with beads belted around her waist. Using this fact as the basis for the poem, Mills presents the West African beads as the secret the woman wore throughout her enslaved years, a symbol of her ancestral heritage. "Imagine / feeling like you're carrying a country around your waist / … or maybe just clinched echoes of that ocean, salt / reminders of a white man's transatlantic tantrum." The reader is introduced to the profound shame of child slave chimney sweeps, their young bodies starved and deformed from the dangerous task of climbing up and cleaning narrow, creosote-infested chimney flues. "Started printcin' when I was I was six … My life up in nothin' but smoke." "My should-be-blooming bones squashed from twist and scrunch; limbs wrung from heavin' bags of soot twice my teeny self." Equally horrifying is the fact that the fledgling Columbia University students (some as young as fifteen) regularly robbed graves at the African Burial Ground, using the cadavers for anatomy class. "Talking to the Bones: Columbia Graverobber Victim" begins with the punch: "Who did this? Abuse's students." Continuing to delve into this travesty, "Autopsy's insights, legged real / estate could've properly been considered property. / Hell, at the end of the day, they were just homework." When free Negroes petitioned for the enslaved bodies to at least be treated with dignity, "the Bone Bill" would have stopped grave-robbing but was not passed by the Common Council (today's equivalent of the City Council). Dividing his book into nine sections, Mills excavates a hidden American history with intellectual vigor and grand poetic expansiveness. Thus he is able to introduce Phillis Wheatley in two poems. "An Almost Audience" details facts about the first published African American female poet. "Bought then brought on the Middle Passage but would one day read passages of her work in London." And in "Sable Marginalia" the brilliant writer and first Negro woman published in the New World is freed, but her "final days were spent shriveling / as a scullery maid / in...

The Resurrection of a Ghost City

In 1993, a glimpse into Newark’s history of enslavement was accidentally resurrected when New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) construction workers uncovered a nineteenth-century interracial burial ground. Despite public protests to halt construction and conduct an in-depth archaeological study, NJPAC officials continued construction, arguing that the site was not a “real” African burial ground. Highlighting the relationship between urban renewal, historic preservation, and Black land dispossession, this paper argues that Black Newarkers’ activism to define the Trinity Church Cemetery as an African burial ground served as a radical political act in legitimizing their place within an evolving Newark.

Introduction to Special issue

Introduction to Special issue

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

Notes on the African Burial Ground National Monument, New York City

Notes on the African Burial Ground National Monument, New York City Erich Kessel Jr. (bio) What does a national monument to a forgotten slave cemetery confer upon the history to which it refers? And what does the form of the monument itself do to how we are meant to grasp this history? In a germinal form, these questions occupied me as I approached the African Burial Ground National Monument, a structure that takes up about a quarter of a small block enclosed by Duane and Reade Streets in New York City amid a towering complex of federal administrative buildings. The monument sits atop a larger span of land that, following a 1697 law in the recently established Province of New York, became a burial plot for slaves and free blacks who had been banned from being interred alongside white parishioners.1 Andrea Frohne’s history of the site points to a 1735 map that marked the plot as the “Negro Burying Place,” reflecting its situation within the racial geography of Manhattan’s sprawling slave estate.2 After 1794, the burial ground was closed and within a century became a plot that would be occupied successively by a department store, a credit reporting agency, and finally a federal building—each erecting an architectural stage in a process of forgetting that transmuted slave society into a multicultural democratic space. Preparatory excavation for a new federal government structure in 1991 once again unearthed the racial history of the plot. The site’s 300-plus year history thus is an archive of this forgetting, and this is the problem that the monument seeks to redress. The monument project was set in motion when the site was named a National Historical Landmark in 1993, following a law signed by George H. W. Bush halting further construction on the plot after two years of protest over the destruction of what Black community members saw as sacred ground. In years following this new designation, researchers at Howard University partnered with General Services Administration (GSA) officials to conduct extensive archaeological research to attempt to reconstitute a history of the erstwhile Negro Burial Ground; their excavations suggested the presence of as many as 15,000 skeletal remains on the site. From this process, a total of 419 skeletal remains were exhumed, and later reinterred in a 2003 ceremony when [End Page E-47] the memorial site was officially dedicated. As an event that drew on West African funerary practices and traditional African religious sites, the ceremony was intended to re-sacralize the space, establishing it as a place of reflective contemplation. As the future of the site became a question at various levels of government, the nomenclature tied to the location shifted—from the “Negro Burial Ground” to the “African Burial Ground.” For Frohne, this shift marks the influence of pan-African and Afrocentric community organizations in the process of protecting the plot; the framing of the space more broadly was shaped by a desire for “a return to Africa (at times a homogenous one)” that could unite the varying arts, cultures, and spiritualties of the diaspora.3 Such a desire played a central role in the design competition run by the GSA for the creation of a monument. The proposal that won the competition was designed by Rodney Léon, a Haitian American architect, in association with Nicole Hollant-Denis and AARIS Architects. Through its visual and processual design, their plan for the site pursues one kind of affective relationship between the Black diaspora and Africa as a lost homeland, wherein the imagination and performance of a return to West Africa repairs an experience of absence, lack, and forgetting. Understanding the aesthetic potentialities of monumentality helps to illuminate how the architects recruited monumental form for the project of remembrance. Writing in early twentieth-century Vienna, the conservationist and art historian Alois Riegl offered a paradigmatic description of the monument. For him, the category defined “a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies (or a complex accumulation thereof) alive and present in the consciousness of future generations.”4 His is a distinctly anthropocentric definition of monumentality, and it also implies that...

Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith Lynn Rainville (bio) Ryan K. Smith Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020 328 pages, 52 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9781421439273, $34.95 HB Not everyone's daily perambulations include a walk by or through a cemetery, but after reading Ryan K. Smith's book you might change your habits. In his latest book, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries, Smith sets out an ambitious goal: to survey three hundred years of urban history by reviewing the concomitant changes to a city's burial grounds. This approach allows him to survey local community ideas about and attitudes toward Native Americans, enslaved and free African Americans, elite and poor Whites, as well as Christian and Jewish communities. By keeping his focus on one southern city—Richmond, Virginia—he is able to survey the diversity of mortuary traditions within that locale throughout numerous eras. As he insightfully observes, "The realm of the dead played an active part in all stages of the city's growth, providing a parallel history still capable of surprise" (10). Smith charts out a second and very timely goal: to explore the individuals (many of whom are recent transplants to the city) who have dedicated countless hours to preserving these sites and/or fighting to protect them. His interviews with these individuals are an important component of his research and this book. Smith's book is a welcome addition to the somewhat crowded field of cemetery studies. Most manuscripts focus upon either one burial ground in great detail or a specific type of cemetery, such as urban cemeteries influenced by the Rural Cemetery Movement, over time. While both approaches have their advantages, each are often too specialized for wider audiences. It is less common to find a scholar who is willing to research the burial grounds used by different ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups, while also covering a broad timeframe. In order to cover this wide range of topics, Smith organized his manuscript into eight chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue. The introduction connects the historic research to the function and importance of these sites in the present. In his first chapter, "The Churchyard," Smith integrates biographical examples from specific individuals into broader trends within Virginian history. By tracing specific deaths, such as the demise and burial of Parson Robert Rose (1703–1751), Smith provides a concrete example of how a person's identity and status in life dictates their burial options. In the next chapter, "The African Burial Ground," he traces the scant historic evidence for early African and African American burials and integrates them alongside the archaeological, topographical, and legal documentation. The accompanying figures and maps for this chapter are excellent and help the reader see that the sacred burial spaces for Black Americans are now hidden under modern highways and buildings. This chapter also provides an important overview of the preservation battles that have surrounded historic African American burial grounds in Richmond and provides a necessary context for the elite burials in nearby Shockoe Hill Cemetery (surrounded by sites such as the poorhouse and a Jewish burial ground). Chapter 3, "The New Burying Ground," discusses that cemetery in Shockoe Hill—originally for Whites only—which contains the bodies of Richmond's most prominent families, including governors, Revolutionary War heroes, congressmen, and professionals including ministers, physicians, businessmen, and lawyers. The multicentury trajectory of burials at this site enables Smith to track the evolution of mortuary traditions, the design of cemetery landscapes, and the function of these grounds to display and interpret the gradual desegregation of this formerly White [End Page 126] cemetery, and he also weaves individual biographies into larger historic narratives in a compelling fashion. As with most of the chapters in this book, the author discusses contemporary efforts to protect this site, including the formation in 2007 of the Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery, which cares for the site. This cemetery has an interesting challenge in the present: to reconcile "its position as 'a white aristocratic burial ground' set within a...

Slave Sites on Display: Reflecting Slavery’s Legacy through Contemporary “Flash” Moments by Helena Woodard

Reviewed by: Slave Sites on Display: Reflecting Slavery’s Legacy through Contemporary “Flash” Moments by Helena Woodard Court Carney Slave Sites on Display: Reflecting Slavery’s Legacy through Contemporary “Flash” Moments. By Helena Woodard. African Diaspora Material Culture. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. Pp. vi, 182. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-2417-2; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-2416-5.) In 2019, set to coincide with the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Africans to Virginia, the New York Times ran a series of essays (some written by academics, others by journalists) that contemplated in various ways the continued significance of that historic moment. The resultant controversy of the “1619 Project,” driven by a group of professional historians who disagreed in ways large and small with the scope and tenor of the essays, underscored the unfixed nature of the past and the persistent struggle to make cohesive sense out of a national history defined as much by its divisions and omissions as any unified vision of oneness. This media flashpoint served as a present-day reminder to the volatility of how the American past is continually framed and reframed (often hinged on conceptions of race and racism). These same issues of memory, memorialization, cultural forgetting, and the building of an incomplete history help frame Helena Woodard’s new book, Slave Sites on Display: Reflecting Slavery’s Legacy through Contemporary “Flash” Moments. Sitting at the center of this book is an important, if often undernuanced, set of questions: How do we balance understanding the past with presentism and the need for historical context? How has the past revealed itself through the prism of the present without being unwittingly corrupted by the present? How do museums and memorials allow for the past to be in the present without being of the present? But conversely: how do we capture the essence of the past at all without succumbing to the pressures of presentism? Woodard parses these complex issues through the examination of five memory sites: slave castles, the African Burial Ground in New York City, presidential estates, a reconstructed slave ship, and the slave memorial at Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. These individual stories are connected rhetorically through Woodard’s use of the “flash” moment: “specific circumstances and/or seminal events within a geopolitical framework that binds the history of Atlantic slavery to its continued resonance or impact in the present” (p. 6). Thus, Woodard is set up to discuss the past and the present through the lens of race by way of this structure. The chapter on slave castles (with an important discussion of sankofa) is a good example of what this book does best: using a particular monument to get at the underlying complexity of how the past exists in the present. Other chapters, such as the one on the reimagining of a nineteenth-century slave ship and the importance of memorial discomfort, are also worth the read. The section on presidential estates (a study of the differing ways slavery is presented on George Washington’s, Thomas Jefferson’s, and Andrew Jackson’s plantations) could [End Page 161] use more historical buttressing to develop more thoroughly her larger argument. Still, at its best, Woodard’s book offers a multifaceted examination of the power the past has on the present and the present has on the past. What makes the 1619 story, or the Olaudah Equiano story, or the story of slave castles so powerful is that they contain immediate truths, confirmed falsehoods, and enough uncertainty to bend and warp within any chosen narrative. This knot of ambiguity might play out well in the classroom, where discussion and critical thinking are key, but once these stories become embedded in public monuments or memorials, they become fixed; the vibrations of knowing and unknowing turn static as they emerge as fact. Does a quasi-historical (even antihistorical) monument provide enough meaning—however wrongheaded—to justify its place in the present moment? Can Equiano or the Door of No Return, in other words, have a rhetorical power beyond the limits of their current formulation? Are monuments real enough or teachable enough on their own terms—however flawed—or are...

Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith

Reviewed by: Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith Joy M. Giguere (bio) Keywords Cemeteries, Richmond, Virginia, Race, Historical memory Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries. By Ryan K. Smith. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 316. Paper, $34.95.) With the profusion of new publications on cemeteries and landscapes of memory, public monuments and memorials, patterns of care for and disposal of human remains, and historic preservation, it would be an under-statement to say that the study of American commemorative culture has flowered in recent years. Jeffrey Smith’s The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth Century America (Lanham, MD, 2017), James Cothran and Erica Danylchak’s Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement (Columbia, SC, 2018), Thomas J. Brown’s Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019), and Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed (Jackson, MS, 2020), edited by Allan Amanik and Kami Fletcher, are just a handful of new works that testify to the current recognition among historians of how the treatment and memorialization of the dead provide a deeper understanding of the social and cultural dynamics of the living over time and space. Ryan K. Smith’s Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries adds significantly to the depth of this recent explosion in public interest and scholarship by providing a focused study of cemeteries located in Richmond, Virginia. Examining roughly twenty burying grounds that Smith regards as “the largest or most instructive” (10) for understanding the social, religious, and racial dynamics of Richmond’s history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City is as much a meditation on broader historical and contemporary trends concerning the creation, maintenance, and preservation of burying grounds in urban centers across the nation as it is a work of local history. Breaking with traditional patterns of cemetery-related scholarship that often focus on a single cemetery (or type of cemetery) or time period, Smith provides what could best be described as extended biographies of Richmond’s major burial sites, wherein he analyzes these spaces as reflections [End Page 710] of the values, power dynamics, and struggles of the living communities they served as much as they functioned as repositories for the dead. Addressed in eight thematic and roughly chronological chapters, these burying grounds include historically white spaces such as St. John’s Churchyard (est. 1741), Shockoe Hill Cemetery (est. 1822), and Hollywood Cemetery (est. 1847); African American spaces such as the African Burial Ground (est. 1700s), the Barton Heights Cemeteries (est. 1815), Evergreen Cemetery (est. 1891), and East End Cemetery (est. 1897); the Jewish Hebrew Cemetery (est. 1816) and Sir Moses Montefiore Cemetery (est. 1886); and cemeteries where both Black and white burials took place, such as the city-owned Oakwood Cemetery (est. 1854) and Richmond National Cemetery (est. 1866). Regarding the broad temporal parameters of his book, Smith explains in his introduction, “since general studies of cemeteries have rarely bridged their subjects’ origins with the dynamics of their modern preservation, this book attempts to forward a model here” (10). Smith thus provides a dynamic new framework for future cemetery scholarship, for by examining the deeper history of the creation and evolution of Richmond’s burying grounds, he is not just considering the changing patterns of care for and disposal of the dead or the evolution in cemetery aesthetics. Rather, by pushing his gaze to the present, Smith ably charts the history of urban development in Richmond and how this reflects the broader patterns of segregation and ongoing marginalization of the African American community despite the gains of the civil rights movement and burial desegregation in the late 1960s. Such patterns appear in stark relief with the historical trajectory of white burying grounds. Even in Smith’s chapter on Jewish cemeteries, he illustrates how, despite their religious distinctiveness and at times marginalization from the dominant Christian community, the ability of these cemeteries to withstand the forces of urban development and their survival as dynamic and useful spaces for the dead is a testament to how collective whiteness transcended...

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle

Reviewed by: The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle Christopher Blakley (bio) The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom james a. delle University Press of Florida, 2019 224 pp. African slavery shaped the society, economy, and culture of northeastern North America beginning as early as 1626, when Dutch settlers forcibly relocated Atlantic Africans to New Netherland. Twelve years later William Pierce sailed the Desire from the Caribbean to Boston, where he hoped to sell a cargo of captive Africans, possibly including Dorcas "ye blackmore," in exchange for enslaved Indigenous people seized by settlers during the Pequot War. James A. Delle's study of the archaeology of northern slavery and freedom explores the materiality of enslavement, fugitivity, and emancipation in the Northeast and New England from the early seventeenth century to the antebellum era and Reconstruction. He argues at the outset that "American slavery was not born in the tobacco fields of Virginia or the rice plantations of the Carolina Low Country but in the villages of Puritan New England and on the streets of Dutch New Amsterdam, the settlement that would eventually become New York City" (31). Drawing on previous scholarship—including archaeological field excavations led by colleagues and his own research conducted with field school teams on multiple sites in the Northeast—Delle makes use of an abundance of archival and archaeological materials to consider the lives of enslaved, self-emancipated, and free people of color over the longue durée. The book fuses analysis with historical documents to a range of material cultural evidence from architecture to ceramics, metal and glass artifacts, cultural landscapes, tools, musical instruments, conjure bundles, and children's toys to reconstruct the everyday lives of diverse communities. A central thesis of the book is that enslaved people experienced and survived violence from slaveholders in the North in much the same way as others did in the South, and Delle's efforts to challenge commonplace notions among the public of kind and benevolent northern slaveholders is worthwhile. The book is divided into eight chapters organized into five sections that examine the themes of the history of northern slavery, the materiality of enslavement in the North, the forms of resistance the enslaved practiced in opposition to their enslavers or slave-catching gangs, the kinds of freedoms [End Page 575] that formerly enslaved people pursued, and the commemoration of northern slavery. Delle begins by providing an overview of northern slavery and archaeological investigations, first with the form of critical community archaeology developed at the African Burial Ground in New York. This excavation conducted in Lower Manhattan raised the methodological question of how to "decolonize the field" of historical archaeology, and it is surprising that beyond this brief mention Delle does not explicitly return to this question throughout his book. Other sites of either enslaved or free African Americans discussed include Lucy Foster's Garden in Andover, Massachusetts; two communities of free people—Skunk Hollow, New Jersey, and Parting Ways, Massachusetts; and provisioning plantations in Rhode Island, principally at Newport, a center of Atlantic slaving throughout the eighteenth century. Following his survey of archaeological projects, Delle turns to reviewing the historiography of slavery in the Northeast and New England, and he discusses the scholarship of Wendy Warren and Christy Clark-Pujara. A third chapter takes up a number of archaeological sites in the North, including another African burial ground in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the provisioning manors of Long Island, and plantations in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In addition to domestic objects like clay pipes and ceramics, Delle draws attention to artifacts associated with conjure and medicine, such as cowrie shells, glass beads, bundles of iron objects, and a stone pestle. Moving to a single case study, Delle presents his research of one plantation, Rose Hill, in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Descendants of the well-known Carter family of Virginia purchased the estate in 1802 and relocated the enslaved families they possessed to the Genesee Country to produce and sell wheat flour for the Baltimore flour trade as food for provisioning captives on Caribbean plantations. Delle and colleagues investigated the remnant buildings at Rose Hill and its environs, including a home that...

Historical overview, current research, and emerging bioethical guidelines in researching the New York African burial ground.

The issues addressed in this article are those related to the bioethical actions and decisions surrounding the excavation of the New York African Burial Ground (NYABG) in the 1990s, the significance of conducting research on historical African/African American remains, and the eminence of protecting newly discovered African American burial sites in the future for research purposes. Skeletal (n=419, at the time of excavation) and soil (n=92) remains of the 17th and 18th century New York African Burial Ground were used to discuss the necessity of research on historical African/African American remains. Studying the remains of enslaved Africans is critical to understanding the biological processes and existence of all people. Researching the NYABG site, the oldest and largest burial site of free and enslaved Africans, illuminates the necessity and significance of scientific research on other historical African/African American cemeteries throughout the nation. The results of future research will provide a more profound sense of identity for a group of people who were forcefully severed from their genetic and cultural origins. This research will increase the representation of African descended people in genomic, anthropological, and cultural research, and ultimately help researchers to learn more about the origins of all humans.

‘The sad aperture of the dead’: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and the anti-blackness of the book as an object

ABSTRACT Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) appropriates as its structuring metaphor the architecture of New York City’s African Burial Ground National Monument. More specifically, the novel likens its book form to the Burial Ground memorial’s Ancestral Chamber, a granite portal–an aperture–that offers memorial visitors a glimpse of slavery’s world swirling on the other side. In doing so, Zone One suggests that the book as an object is anti-black, its letters, words, lines, paragraphs, and pages composed of nothing more than the accumulation of slavery’s dead. Through Atlantic imagery, print jokes, and protagonist Mark Spitz’s discovery of himself dead in a dictionary, Zone One implicates all modern books as manifestations of what the narrator terms the ‘sad aperture of the dead’: a site where Atlantic and textual accumulation meet, the former expressed as water and liquidity, the latter as typographical ‘density’. In recapitulating the African Burial Ground’s mapping, Zone One echoes Dionne Brand’s theory of the ‘Door of No Return’ that identifies the diaspora’s ‘cognitive schema’ as captivity.

Disappearing the Enslaved: The Destruction and Recovery of Richmond's Second African Burial Ground

Disappearing the Enslaved: The Destruction and Recovery of Richmond's Second African Burial Ground

Identification of trace metals and potential anthropogenic influences on the historic New York African Burial Ground population: A pXRF technology approach

The New York African Burial Ground (NYABG) is the country’s oldest and largest burial site of free and enslaved Africans. Re-discovered in 1991, this site provided evidence of the biological and cultural existence of a 17th and 18th Century historic population viewing their skeletal remains. However, the skeletal remains were reburied in October 2003 and are unavailable for further investigation. The analysis of grave soil samples with modern technology allows for the assessment of trace metal presence. Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometry provides a semi-quantitative and non-destructive method to identify trace metals of this population and in the surrounding environment. Sixty-five NYABG soil samples were analyzed on a handheld Bruker Tracer III- SD XRF with 40 kV of voltage and a 30μA current. Presence of As, Cu, and Zn can potentially decipher the influence of the local 18th Century pottery factories. Elevated levels of Sr validate the assumed heavy vegetative diets of poor and enslaved Africans of the time. Decreased levels of Ca may be due in part to the proximity of the Collect Pond, the existing water table until the early 19th Century, and Manhattan’s rising sea level causing an elevated water table washing away the leached Ca from human remains. These data help us reconstruct the lives of these early Americans in what became New York City.

The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space

The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space

Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory by Marc Howard Ross

Reviewed by: Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory by Marc Howard Ross Christy Clark-Pujara Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory. By Marc Howard Ross. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 304. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5038-1.) Marc Howard Ross insightfully examines how and why Americans have forgotten the history of slaveholding in the North. He diligently unpacks how the nation and northerners in particular fail to recall the expansive, long, and persistent history of bondage in the northern colonies and states. By investigating the histories we have chosen to forget, Ross highlights how the stories we tell about our past convey who we want to be, rather than who we are. Ross contends that the vast majority of Americans have little to no knowledge of the practice of slavery in the North. Anyone who has ever taught, written, or participated in any public history exhibit or display about northern slavery knows this to be true. Ross carefully notes that historians, professional and lay, have been writing about northern slavery for decades and that the descendants of enslaved northerners never forgot about it. He centers the study on how people like himself—white, well-rounded, and well-educated—were [End Page 904] unaware of the long history of northern bondage. Ross asks two primary questions: “Why and how was the collective memory of almost 250 years of enslavement in the North forgotten so widely and for so long? And why and how has public awareness and a collective memory of Northern slavery been partially recovered in recent decades?” (p. 1). Ross begins by carefully defining and explaining collective memory and forgetting, and he then lays out a brief summation of slaveholding and slavery-related businesses in the North, such as the slave trade and the textile revolution. Ross then examines various memorializing efforts in the North, paying special attention to the President’s House Site in Philadelphia (where George Washington lived with nine enslaved people), black burial grounds, such as the New York City African Burial Ground, and other public spaces. I particularly appreciated his concern for various interest groups and the tensions that arise when communities decide to remember the lives of enslaved people and those who held them in bondage. Ross ends the study with some suggestions on collective recovery. Ross asserts that collective memories “are socially constructed accounts that change in response to contemporary political events and social conditions” (p. 37). He further asserts that collective forgetting is rooted in “the disappearance of narratives about past events and people involved in them,” the diminishing of rituals about them, and the “loss or destruction of visible public, commemorative landscapes and objects that earlier marked the existence of Northern slavery” (pp. 89, 90). He argues that Americans have forgotten about northern bondage because there are few stories, rituals, or commemorative sites that remind the public that people were enslaved in the North, unlike in the South where Civil War memorials and plantation tours abound. He also argues that northerners fail to remember northern slaveholding because the emancipation process was long, protracted, and complex. Unlike the end of slavery in the South, there was no major event—like the Civil War—that precipitated an end to slaveholding. Ross further contends that avoidance, self-silencing, reframing, shame, and guilt have encouraged most northerners to forget northern bondage. Ross contends that northern slavery has become more visible as African Americans have become more socially and politically prominent and as historians have increasingly focused on the experiences of marginalized peoples. Ross suggests that the recovery of the history of northern slavery necessitates compelling personal narratives, public ceremonies, and physical memorials throughout the North to educate and remind Americans that generations of Africans and African Americans lived, labored, and died in bondage in the North. Ross, however, underestimates the impact of primary and secondary education, Hollywood, and many museums. These institutions have contributed to a simplistic narrative of an abolitionist North and a proslavery South; this one-dimensional history does not allow for a complex understanding and acknowledgment of 250 years of slaveholding in the North. Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and...