Cemeteries

There have been many studies of cemetery populations in urban areas. These studies are important because of the information they provide about the lives and deaths of the people interred, including their burial customs as well as the length of their lives and the state of their health. In the United States, there have been a number of studies of African-American burial grounds, including two cemeteries associated with the First African Baptist Church in Philadelphia and the Freedman’s Cemetery in Dallas, which was in use in the late nineteenth century and where more than 1100 burials were exhumed in the early 1990s. But the most remarkable of these excavations was that of the African Burial Ground in New York City (Figure 3). Here, archaeologists were surprised to discover that a Negroes’ Burial Ground that had been in use from at least as early as 1712 until the 1790s had not in fact been destroyed by later construction as they had thought, but had been preserved. In the course of the subsequent archaeological excavations in 1991-92, over 400 graves were disinterred. This project is extremely important for a number of reasons. It has provided information that was completely lacking on the state of the enslaved in New York City during the colonial period and it has brought home in no uncertain terms the fact that enslavement was as deeply embedded in the northern American colonies as it was in the south - a fact which most New Yorkers had preferred to forget. Finally, the project provoked protests and demonstrations on

Figure 2 The interior of a late 18th-century wooden wharf from the Assay Site, New York City (New York State Museum).

Figure 3 The excavation of a burial at the 18th-century African Burial Ground, New York City (US General Services Administration).

The part of members of the city’s African-American communities. They were ultimately successful in stopping the excavations and having its results analyzed by scholars with Africanist historical and cultural perspectives. Their successful protest has revolutionized the way that archaeologists in the United States approach the study of African-American communities as well as those of other groups. Now they try to work with community members in uncovering the past. The term ‘descendant community’ has been expanded to include members of many groups other than the Native Americans to whom it was first applied.

Another extremely important excavation took place in the vaults of Christ Church Spitalfields, in London in the mid-1980s. Here, archaeologists excavated almost 1000 burials that had been interred between 1729 and 1853. This excavation was unusual for a number of reasons. It was the first large-scale excavation of a post-Medieval English cemetery. In addition, because of environmental conditions, preservation at the site was incredibly good. Bone and teeth were well preserved, as was soft tissue in many cases. And finally, the coffins of almost 400 of the interred still bore legible coffin plates with the names and ages at death of the dead, allowing research into the lives of the people whose remains had been disinterred, so that their occupations, socioeconomic standing and ethnicity could be taken into account in the study.