Unmarked Graves Research Articles

Locating and characterizing burials using 3D ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) at the historic Mueschke Cemetery, Houston, Texas

We use ground-penetrating radar (GPR), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), cemetery records, and oral histories to locate and characterize unmarked burials at the Mueschke Cemetery in Houston, Texas. We employ TLS surveying for the reconnaissance of the various types of burials in the cemetery. Concrete burials were used after 1940 while wooden burials were common before 1940. Strong correlations of TLS shallow surface mounds and depressions with known burials provide substantial motivation to follow-up with a detailed investigation with GPR. To calibrate the GPR survey, we undertook excavation and lab experiments to measure relative dielectric constant (3−10), moisture content (14%–21%), and electrical conductivity (0.36–0.38S/m) of the location's soil. Grain-size experiments indicated that the soil at the survey location is reasonable for GPR, which was subsequently reinforced by the high quality GPR images with a depth of penetration of about 2.5m and a vertical resolution of 6cm. Numerical modeling provided a signature of a concrete burial with a flat rectangular top while a wooden burial resembles a typical hyperbola shape. 2D GPR template surveys over concrete and wooden burials show strong response and follow the numerical modeling findings. Three methods were used to estimate the soil radar velocity: CMP, two-way travel time (TWTT), and hyperbola fitting. These techniques yielded a soil velocity of about 0.055–0.067m/ns. 3D GPR surveys produced anomalies that were consistent with headstones, cemetery records, and oral histories. Taking GPR depth slices overlain on the TLS elevation profile and cemetery records strongly indicated the location of two suspected unmarked graves including the oldest burial (1875) of James West.

Kinship across conflict: family blood, political bones, and exhumation in contemporary Spain

In post-conflict countries, caring for the dead challenges how family kinship and national history are organised. The exhumation of unmarked mass graves following decolonisation, civil war, and other forms of violence and oppression is one way by which heritage managers reconfigure kinship and history in the aftermath of conflict. Where governments fail to identify and acknowledge the dead, archaeologists and other heritage managers use exhuming to negotiate how the dead and their familial and political ties are remembered. In Spain, the exhumation of anti-Francoist guerrillas killed after the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War serves to restore broken kinship lines and give the dead a proper burial. Yet the symbolic and material recovery of their bones obligates families – and the nation – to confront the political past and their relationship with the anti-Francoist dead. Drawing on ethnographic data from Teilán, Spain, I examine how the material presence of the anti-Francoist dead resurfaces competing kinship responsibilities and ongoing political legacies in contemporary Spain. I conclude by drawing from these lessons to reflect on the exhumation process in other countries, drawing out the inferences especially for countries across Africa.

Evaluation of the efficacy of spatiotemporal Pb isoscapes for provenancing of human remains

Geospatially distributed isotopes (isoscapes) from biogeochemically fractionated processes have been applied in many forensic investigations, such as authentication of food and sourcing of drugs. Provenancing of human remains using isotopes has been hindered by a lack of appropriate isoscapes, by changes in these isoscapes over time, and by various homogenization processes. In this study we create spatiotemporal isoscapes for anthropogenic lead (Pb) for the contiguous United States and Europe using literature data from dated sediments, soils and biological tissues. We compare 206Pb/207Pb isoscapes with isoscapes of δ13C, δ18O and 87Sr/86Sr to determine their relative efficacy for the forensic identification of human remains. We do this comparison using third molar enamel data from 22 United States Air Force Academy cadets with known life trajectories born between 1983 and 1985. We use these spatiotemporal isoscapes with osteologic analyses, hospital records and isotopic analyses of tooth enamel carbonate from permanent teeth to help identify 32 individuals from unmarked graves found in a forgotten 19th century mental asylum cemetery.

Bioarchaeological Investigations of Nineteenth-Century African American Burials at the Pioneer Cemetery (41BO202) in Brazoria, Texas

A search for unmarked graves in the state-owned right of way and underneath the pavement of State Highway 332 resulted in the discovery and archeological excavation of 11 unmarked graves associated with Pioneer Cemetery, an African American burial ground in Brazoria, Texas. Prewitt and Associates, Inc., conducted the fieldwork for the Texas Department of Transportation’s Archeological Studies Program. Between 2008 and 2012, the 11 unmarked graves were discovered, exhumed, analyzed, and then reinterred in Pioneer Cemetery in September 2012. This report describes the bioarcheological investigations of those burials along with 3 other unmarked burials that were previously exhumed and reburied in 2003. The mortuary remains, especially the manufacturing dates on the coffin hardware, indicate that the 14 exhumed burials date to the late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth centuries. Based on the osteological evidence, the deceased persons were 5 women, 2 men, 2 indeterminate adults, and 5 children. Seven of the 14 individuals display skeletal traits indicating that they are of African descent, but 2 indeterminate adults and 5 children do not. Based on historical evidence, it is likely that all 14 individuals were African Americans, and several of the older individuals may have been born into slavery. These 14 burials do not constitute a representative sample of the African Americans in Brazoria County or the town of Brazoria, but they are an interesting and historically significant burial population nonetheless. The overall health status of these people was generally good, with no evidence of abnormally high pathologies. However, skeletal remains of several older individuals exhibited evidence of various forms of degenerative joint disease indicative of lives spent doing hard labor. One adult male had an amputated leg and an iron and wooden prosthesis; it is not known if the loss of his leg was due to violence, accidental trauma, or disease. Several of the Pioneer burials exhibit traits that may represent mortuary behaviors of African origin. Three individuals had vaulted burials, with the casket or coffin located inside a shaft under a protective wooden arch. One adult female was buried with a complete whiteware saucer and a bird talon that was partially wrapped in gold plating and may have been worn as a necklace.

The Activities of the Committee for the Preservation of Military Traditions from Turda (THHB)

Abstract The Institute of Military History of the Hungarian Ministry of Defence decided in 2000 to try to find the marked or unmarked graves of Hungarian soldiers killed in World War II. Joining this initiative, Jozsef Patakv founded the Committee for the Preservation of Military Traditions from Turda (THHB). Among other things, the aim of establishing the Committee was to discover the identity of the Hungarian soldiers that died in action in the fall of 1944 in Torda (in Romanian: Turda: in the followings, we will use the traditionally Hungarian name of the town: Torda) and its surroundings, find the location where they were buried, and erect a worthy monument to their memory. A Hungarian Soldier Graveyard was created within the Central Hungarian Cemetery of Torda, which has since become a place of pilgrimage. In addition, more then fifty sites of Hungarian soldiers’ graves were discovered and in most of the cases properly marked since that time. In 2012, Jozsef Patakv was awarded the Hungarian Gold Cross by the Ministry of Defence for his untiring work to discover the places of burial and identify Hungarian soldiers that died in WWII, and for worthily keeping their memories alive.

Negotiating freedoms in the convergent mediascape

The research in this issue questions whether media convergence is opening new possibilities for a greater range of voices to be heard or threatening to close down channels through which diversity and democracy is being expressed. Ross Tapsell argues that convergence is both contributing to and undermining freedom in Indonesia. He observes that scholars have viewed media freedom as threatened and explores the factors that have led technological convergence to commercial convergence. In comparison, Sarah Harris’ analyses of two cases of digital activism in Turkey evidence how censorship is a systematic process grounded in legal and media infrastructures. Her case studies show the effect of erasure on both public and individual discourse; for example, Blocked Web collects and organizes data on state-classified website bans, whilst Interactive Mass Grave Map marks the locations of hundreds of unmarked graves in which disappeared citizens are thought to be buried. Both are unpleasant reminders of the attempts of the powerful to shut down voices of dissent. Beyond state and media infrastructures media creators are exploring the textual and linguistic borderlands provided by new technologies for spaces for discourses of diversity and formation of new meaning. Megan Condis cites BioWare’s decision to include diversity in games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Dragon Age II, by adding the option to play as a gay male character. Through her analysis she questions how titles such as ‘fan’ or ‘gamer’ are being contested along the lines of gender and sexuality. Aylish Wood on the other hand examines how virtual spaces afford new locations for meaning construction. Her examples are the three-dimensional (3D) cinematic space in Hugo and the IMAX format in The Dark Knight. Such a space offers multiple points of engagement for an audience. Both articles focus on case studies that extend the vocabulary of their media discourse. The new media aesthetics of 3D cinema previously featured in a guest-edited special section of Convergence (November 2013, Vol. 19, issue 4). Wood’s article follows on from this and extends

Between rocks and a hard place: prehistoric funerary practices at Wādī Ḍebayʿān, northern Qatar

Archaeological survey by the Qatar National Historic Environment Record Project (QNHER) in 2009, led to the discovery of a Neolithic flint scatter, a settlement and an ancient, raised shoreline associated with higher, mid‐Holocene sea levels at Wādī Ḍebayʿān, north‐western Qatar (Al‐Naimi et al. 2010, 2011; Cuttler, Tetlow & Al‐Naimi 2011). The QNHER project is a collaboration between Qatar Museums and the University of Birmingham, which over the past five years has developed a national geospatial database for the recording of archaeological sites and historic monuments in Qatar. A significant aspect of the project involved archaeological survey and excavation in advance of major construction projects. Between 2012 and 2014 excavations at Wādī Ḍebayʿān revealed a burial of a typology previously unknown in Qatar, the unmarked graves (Cuttler, Al‐Naimi & Tetlow 2013).

Still searching for graves: an analytical strategy for interpreting geophysical data used in the search for “unmarked” graves

Searching for and mapping the physical extent of unmarked graves using geophysical techniques has proven difficult in many cases. The success of individual geophysical techniques for detecting graves depends on a site‐by‐site basis. Significantly, detection of graves often results from measured contrasts that are linked to the background soils rather than the type of archaeological feature associated with the grave. It is evident that investigation of buried remains should be considered within a 3D space as the variation in burial environment can be extremely varied through the grave. Within this paper, we demonstrate the need for a multi‐method survey strategy to investigate unmarked graves, as applied at a “planned” but unmarked pauper’s cemetery. The outcome from this case study provides new insights into the strategy that is required at such sites. Perhaps the most significant conclusion is that unmarked graves are best understood in terms of characterization rather than identification. In this paper, we argue for a methodological approach that, while following the current trends to use multiple techniques, is fundamentally dependent on a structured approach to the analysis of the data. The ramifications of this case study illustrate the necessity of an integrated strategy to provide a more holistic understanding of unmarked graves that may help aid in management of these unseen but important aspects of our heritage. It is concluded that the search for graves is still a current debate and one that will be solved by methodological rather than technique‐based arguments.

Leaving a Mark

Leaving a Mark John Tytell (bio) The Trace Forrest Gander New Directions Publishing www.ndbooks.com 240 Pages; Print, $22.95 Forrest Gander’s The Trace is a compelling—one might say stunning—novel. I would place it in the tradition of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947). Though it’s not as linguistically ravishing and reckless, it surely spirals on the same downward trajectory to a Mexican hell. The Trace comes to us with the blistering heat of Cormac McCarthy. Like Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949), another Conradian tale of the white man as interloper in unfamiliar terrain, it rivets on the tension between an unmatched couple on a sort of literary pilgrimage that get detoured into a devouring desert. The two pilgrims in Gander’s spare, exquisitely chiseled story are Hoa and Dale. Hoa is a potter, daughter of a Vietnamese woman who had worked as a clerk in the American Embassy in the late 1960s and married an American accountant. Hoa studied art at the University of North Carolina at Ashville where Dale teaches history, and where they met in the library stacks. Married for twenty years, their lives have become transformed by their only son’s auto accident. Declan has had a painful recovery, and just prior to completing his undergraduate work, he drops out and disconnects entirely from them. Headstrong, anti-authoritarian, given to spasmodic argumentativeness, Declan has vanished in an angry void. In the wake of his absence, Hoa blames Dale; she relies on sleeping pills, and he relies on anti-anxiety medication. They both feel depressed and somehow guilty. Waiting to hear some word, a telephone message assuring safety, months pass, and their marriage becomes mechanical: take-out food eaten on TV trays. During his summer break from teaching, as part of a book he is writing, Dale decides to pursue the actual trail of Ambrose Bierce, perhaps the best-known disappearance in American literature. A caustic journalist and short story writer, Bierce decided in 1913 to interview the Mexican rebel Pancho Villa, despite his lack of Spanish. Crossing the Texan border at El Paso on horseback, he reputedly joined Villa’s forces near the city of Chihuahua. There, all traces of his existence end, and the probability is that wounded in a skirmish with Mexican federales, his remains lie in an unmarked grave. But there are various versions of his death—enough for legend—and Dale is on a search for traces. Hoa decides to accompany him although he warns there will be hours and hours of driving. The couple flies from Ashville to El Paso where they rent a Chevrolet Prizm to proceed south and visit the places near the Chihuahua desert that Bierce is supposed to have explored—a silver and zinc mine called La Hacienta de los Muertos, a battlefield and several small towns. The desert with its vertical canyon walls, volcanic massifs, and serrated mountains is a moonscape of cacti and yucca, mesquite and brush in sand. The desiccating threat of its heat shimmer, and the lacerating sun becomes a dominating presence in the novel, “a terrain so brutally indifferent to human beings that, but for the road, it managed to repel almost any trace of the world’s most aggressive species.” The journey is demarcated by bizarre occurrences. The novel begins with a short graphic scene of macabre Aztec horror near a town called La Esmeralda where a Mexican drug bandit with a bobbing head methodically skins the decapitated head of a victim and drapes the skin over a soccer ball; the quartered remains of the same body are later manifested to Dale and Hoa when they reach the zocalo of Esmeralda. As they proceed on their journey, they see hovering vultures and rattlesnakes, spiders, a giant tarantula, and later an “inky torrent” of bats streaming out of a cave in which Dale seeks shelter. Portents appear along the way: the memento mori on the sides of the road commemorating crashes; a dog sitting on the road mourning another dead dog. Weirdly, while driving, Dale compulsively admits the memory of a college acid trip that ended in an underground crawl in a...

Kashmir: the forgotten conflict

The author, a Kashmiri journalist, contemplates how Kashmir is being publicly portrayed. Though atrocities like the Holocaust are quite rightly memorialised for their horror, the world ignores the Kashmir conflict despite its 80,000 dead, 6,000 mass and unmarked graves, and thousands of disappeared youth – post resistance of 1989. And while provocations like the execution of Mohammad Afzal Guru and other oppressive tactics by India are still radicalising new sections of Kashmiri youth, India publicly promotes the notion of a Kashmir at peace whilst never accepting its role in human rights abuses. Who, asks the author, will tell Kashmir’s story? Who will memorialise the atrocities it has suffered?

Networked erasure

The essay analyses two cases of digital activism in Turkey, which visualize ‘networked erasure’ to illustrate how censorship is a systematic process. The first case, an interactive online database called Blocked Web, launched in 2007, collects and organizes data on state-classified web site bans, and represents cyber censorship as grounded in legal and media infrastructures. The second example, the Interactive Mass Grave Map, produced by the Human Rights Association of Turkey, marks the locations of hundreds of unmarked graves in which disappeared citizens are thought buried and connects historical human erasure to contemporary censorship. Through visual analysis and personal fieldwork interviews, I explore the ways that these projects extend theoretical approaches to control in the digital age and hack into ‘switching power’ (Castells, 2009). Foregoing the sensationalism that can accompany close-ups on a victim or banned web site, the examples employ a distanced approach that visualizes and points to state-media cronyism, institutionalized discrimination, and widespread apathy.

Historic Archeological Investigations at Roberts Cemetery Near Troy, Bell County, Texas

A preliminary archeological investigation was conducted in 2008 at Roberts Cemetery near Troy, Texas, as part of the Texas Department of Transportation’s planned expansion of Interstate Highway 35. Mechanical trenching discovered one unmarked grave near the highway right of way, and this led to an extensive mechanical search of the eastern edge of the cemetery in 2012. Following the removal of the southbound access road and thick layer of artificial fill, five additional unmarked graves were discovered. Of the six unmarked graves, two are located in the cemetery property and were left in place, but the four burials inside the highway right of way were exhumed. They were reinterred in a nearby plot in Roberts Cemetery.

The True Image: Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry by David W. Patterson (review)

Reviewed by: The True Image: Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry by David W. Patterson Thomas G. Connors (bio) Keywords Scots Irish, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Stonecutters, Gravestones The True Image: Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry. By David W. Patterson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 481. Cloth, $49.95.) What can be learned about the Scotch Irish by a close examination of an extended family of stonecutters’ work, lives, and community? 1 A great deal, as David Patterson proves in this book, the product of decades of research while Kenan Chair of English and Folklore at UNC–Chapel Hill. As a result, the arguments made are careful and authoritative, [End Page 303] grounded in primary sources and placed in regional, national, and trans-Atlantic contexts. The book contributes a lot to our understanding of the early Scotch Irish community, particularly in the Carolina backcountry. Years of combing legal and church records, gathering folk stories, and networking with genealogists provide the evidence that helps sketch the world the Bigham stonecutters lived and worked in, first on the edge of white settlement and usually on the fringes of a comfortable, secure life. While the familiar leading families, such as Davieses and Polks, make vivid appearances here, the Bighams occupied a less documented place in society, gaining and losing land, leaving modest lists of possessions in probate records, and usually coming to rest in unmarked graves. This focus allows Patterson to draw conclusions about the Scotch Irish distinct from any broader Appalachian culture, and to challenge generalizations made elsewhere, including David Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, Charles Sellers’s work on early Mecklenburg, and Senator James Webb’s Born Fighting.2 The community Patterson reconstructs is far from idyllic, but instead aggressive, aggrieved, and suspicious of power exerted by external forces. The new elite that emerged tended to be second generation, born and educated into the professions in North America, and able to take advantage of opportunities to gain land and status in frontier settings, eventually over the mountains in Tennessee and beyond. Changes in society are reflected in its burial grounds, as Patterson demonstrates throughout the book. Few regions experienced the Revolution as brutally as the Carolina backcountry, creating a fierce patriotism found in nationalist symbols on its tombstones and later exercised by the two presidents born there. By the late eighteenth century, some of its most successful citizens openly embraced Deism. The Great Revival arrived with the new century and bitterly divided churches over a now obscure dispute whether to sing the traditional Scottish Psalter or introduce Isaac Watts’s hymns. Inscriptions adapted from Watts begin to appear soon afterwards, signaling the deceased’s stance on the controversy. Eventually the issue of slavery came to divide the community, with opponents leaving to settle in the Midwest. [End Page 304] At the heart of the book is Patterson’s exhaustive analysis of the imagery and inscriptions found on the markers, all beautifully illustrated with his photography. They prove a rich and unique source for the Scotch Irish, both “a gallery of public art and anthology of verse” (14) and “the only known graphic art from the community” (60). A distinctive school of carvers flourished in the backcountry during the second half of the eighteenth century, before being overwhelmed by the growing influence of a broader national culture in the early decades of the nineteenth. The extended Bigham workshop of seven stonecutters left behind about 1,050 surviving markers found in Pennsylvania and dating from the 1730s through the 1750s; and then in the Carolinas from about 1760 to 1830. The imagery and verse they employed on their markers exhibit a willingness to draw on a range of influences from both the old and new countries, freely adapting symbols and text to fit their design. The symbolism most often professes faith or claims place within a family or trade. After the Revolution, a rich mix of more secular imagery emerges, including an odd collection of heraldic symbols cobbled together without authorization to assert a family’s status. Eagles and stars reflect...

Meetings with Anna Akhmatova

Meetings with Anna Akhmatova Tomas Venclova (bio) and Ellen Hinsey (bio) When did you first meet Anna Akhmatova? I believe it was in 1963. Our landlady, Elena Vasilyeva, knew Akhmatova personally, although she did not belong to the poet’s inner circle. Once, Akhmatova asked Elena to type the manuscript copy of her essay “Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva.” For several decades, Akhmatova had been seriously researching Pushkin’s life and work. After Soviet censorship had blocked any publication of Akhmatova’s poetry in the 1930s, she became a professional Pushkin scholar (Brodsky, incidentally, considered her among the best, and the only specialist on the same intellectual and artistic level as Pushkin himself). What was the impetus behind her Pushkin scholarship? To a certain degree, it helped her prove that she was engaged in “socially meaningful” work. But she also admired Pushkin more than any other Russian (or foreign) poet, and had a good eye for parallels between their two eras. She scolded me when I took the liberty of saying that Pushkin was not necessarily relevant to my generation. And the essay— “Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva” was not, strictly speaking, a samizdat affair (it was published shortly thereafter), but it had something Akhmatova liked to call a “triple bottom,” like hidden compartments in a smuggler’s suitcase. Its topic was Pushkin’s lonely wanderings in the Vasileostrovsky district of St. Petersburg—unpopulated islands in the Neva where the poet looked for the unmarked graves of his executed friends, leaders of the failed Decembrist uprising. Exactly one hundred years after Pushkin, Akhmatova used to wander in the same part of the city, since her husband Nikolai Gumilev, a great poet executed by the Bolsheviks, was also presumably buried there. Only a few people close to Akhmatova understood the analogy, which escaped the censors. Elena Vasilyeva asked me to bring the typescript to Akhmatova, which I did happily, if timidly. [End Page 170] Where was Akhmatova residing at this time? In Leningrad she lived mainly with the family of her ex-husband Nikolai Punin, to whom she had been married in the 1920s and 1930s. Punin was an avantgarde art critic who also perished at the hands of the Soviet authorities: he died in a labor camp a few months after Stalin’s death. Akhmatova also visited Moscow frequently, usually staying with her friend Nina Olshevskaya, whose husband Viktor Ardov—a minor satirist and a witty man—was appreciated by a number of non-conformist writers including Bulgakov and Pasternak. (It was Ardov who recommended that Akhmatova be reinstated in the Union of Soviet Writers in 1951.) Incidentally, Ardov’s family were among the few permitted to call her “Acuma,” which means “witch” or “hag” in Japanese—a nickname Punin invented. Everyone else, including Brodsky and myself, called her “Anna Andreyevna.” Ardov’s residence on Ordynka Street became a semi-legendary address in post-Stalinist Moscow. It was only a short walk from Elena’s flat to Ordynka. What happened during your first meeting? Akhmatova was alone in the Ardovs’ rather large apartment—a stout lady with aristocratic bearing (she was sometimes compared to Catherine the Great), looking a bit older than her age, which was seventy-four. We talked in the hallway, perhaps for five minutes—she apologized for not inviting me in, stating that her room was in disarray. I was invited into the various rooms she occupied only during our later meetings. Regardless of whether it was in Moscow or in Leningrad, her living spaces generally looked the same: a cramped room with a writing desk and sofa, and virtually nothing else. There were several drawings on the walls—above all, Modigliani’s famous portrait of Akhmatova in her youth. I believe I saw it in both cities; it may have always accompanied her, though I could be mistaken on this point. Brodsky said that, after his first encounter with Akhmatova, it took him three or four meetings to fully understand with whom he was dealing. But this wasn’t your case— I knew very well with whom I was talking. Needless to say, I felt extremely uneasy, almost paralyzed with timidity. For...

Understanding Cultural History Using Ground-Penetrating Radar Mapping of Unmarked Graves in the Mapoon Mission Cemetery, Western Cape York, Queensland, Australia

The Mapoon Mission Cemetery in Cape York, Queensland contains unmarked pre-contact burials with potential national heritage values, despite a lack of formal recognition and protection through State and National heritage listings. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) showed great potential as a non-intrusive technique to identify over 120 potential unmarked graves and understand mortuary practices at the Cemetery. When integrated with written and oral histories, such information provided new insights into the cultural history of this region, particularly the continuity of Aboriginal occupation and changes in mortuary practices since the establishment of the Mapoon Mission.

Mapping social relationships: geophysical survey of a nineteenth-century American slave cemetery

The goal of this project is to identify unmarked burials inside the known limits of a historic cemetery and unmarked slave burials adjacent to the cemetery to answer questions regarding variability in treatment of slaves by slave owners. This project used three geophysical prospection methods (electromagnetic induction/conductivity, ground penetrating radar, and magnetic susceptibility) to image the subsurface and locate unmarked graves. The results indicate that up to 21 possible unmarked graves exist at the Prior Cemetery. The survey detected 17 with two or more geophysical techniques and four with a single technique. Nine possible unmarked graves were tested with a metal probe. Every tested anomaly revealed less compact soils indicative of an unmarked grave.

ARCHAEOLOGY IN A GEECHEE GRAVEYARD

Archaeological investigations were carried out during May 2010 within Behavior Cemetery, a historic African American graveyard used for more than 120 years by the Gullah-Geechee communities of Sapelo Island, Georgia. Designed in close partnership with the local residents, this project sought to address their concerns about disturbance to unmarked graves when new graves were dug. This paper provides a historical overview of the cemetery and then discusses the methods, results, and outcomes of the field research. The success of the Behavior Cemetery Project serves as a positive example of community-oriented archaeology, a mutually beneficial partnership that simultaneously serves public, academic research, and cultural resource management needs.

Noli me tangere: Memory, embodiment and affect in Silvio Caiozzi's Fernando ha vuelto (2005)

Silvio Caiozzi's 2005 documentary Fernando ha vuelto bears filmic witness to the forensic identification of the remains of Fernando Olivares Mori, an MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) activist under Allende who was disappeared during the Pinochet regime in Chile and whose corpse was deposited in an unmarked grave in the infamous Patio 29 of Santiago General Cemetery. In the film we witness the encounter between Agave Díaz and her dead husband's skeleton, laid out in the laboratories of the Servicio Médico Legal, as scientists explain the injuries inflicted during torture. Taking heed of Nelly Richard's (2004) call for Chilean art-work which employs ‘figurative language (symbols, metaphors, allegories) sufficiently moving so that they enter into a relationship of solidarity with the emotions unleashed by memory’, this article proposes a reading of affect as a way to work through memory and explores the ways that embodiment allows for a spectatorship which permits the viewer to engage with the experiences of Chile's disappeared and their loved ones. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's definitions of touch, the article argues that Caiozzi's film articulates a failed restitution for the families of Chile's disappeared.

John Knox’s International Network

In the early twentieth century, the city of Geneva added to its existing tourist attractions with one of the most peculiar items of civic commemoration in Europe. The Reformation Wall is a queasy monument to Geneva’s glorious past, in which the tensions and prejudices of a very particular view of the sixteenth century are frozen into stone. As one moves towards the centre of the monument, one draws closer to the Genevan fount of Reformed Christian truth. Luther and Zwingli are commemorated, tersely, at the wall’s outermost extremes. Further in, a series of friezes celebrate the deeds of Reformed Protestants in France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England. The monument’s centre, however, is the set of four larger-than-life statues, fixing the viewer with their stern gazes. Three of the figures are obvious. John Calvin himself, of course, stands to the fore. The wall is at heart a memorial to him, to the man who wished to be buried in an unmarked grave, and it was begun on the quatercentenary of his birth. He is joined by Guillaume Farel, the Frenchman who first established the Reformed Church in Geneva and persuaded Calvin to join him in his ministry there; and by Theodore de Béze, Calvin’s successor, biographer and systematizer.

The Use of Electromagnetic Induction in Locating Graves and Mapping Cemeteries: an Example from Native North America

ABSTRACTOne of the most popular applications of geophysics to archaeological problems has been to locate unmarked graves and map cemeteries. Although electromagnetic (EM) induction was one of the early techniques used in such applications, alternative techniques such as ground‐penetrating radar and resistivity have become more popular in recent years. Despite some of the method's drawbacks the EM method still presents numerous advantages such as speed in data collection and collection in a variety of survey environments and ground cover. A case study from Ocmulgee National Monument, USA is presented that identified numerous anomalies that may be interpreted as Native American burials. Small anomalies having low apparent conductivity were distributed near the Funeral Mound (Mound C); a known cemetery. The conductivity survey redefined the spatial extent of the cemetery and increased our understanding of burial density. The data collected during the 2010 field season will aid in conservation efforts and help the US National Park Service avoid these sensitive materials during future archaeological work and park management. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.