HISTORIANS note that funerals
were a source of anxiety for US plan-
tation owners. Gabriel’s Rebellion, led
by an enslaved Virginia blacksmith in
1800, was partly born out of a meet-
ing of mourners. After preacher Nat
Turner’s deadly 1831 insurrection,
Virginia officials made it illegal for
Black spiritual leaders to speak at
burials without supervision. Some en-
slavers outlawed such rites entirely,
or desecrated the dead as a form of
punishment. Simply burying loved
ones could be an act of resistance.
Usually the graves were marked
not with headstones, but with more
ephemeral offerings like wooden
sculptures, broken pottery, field-
stone, and plants—items less likely to
survive the decades.
Even the remains of Black people
who died after the Civil War were im-
periled by legal segregation, a lack
of resources, and gentrification. In
Houston’s Sugar Land suburb, histo-
rians recently fought to protect the
graves of prisoners forced to work on
20th- century plantations in a convict-
leasing system. In Tampa, Florida, a
local reporter documented how the
city’s first Black cemetery, establishedin 1901, had been built over in the
1950s with whites-only housing.
Since the Tampa Bay Times pub-
lished the investigation in June
2019, University of South Florida
archaeologists and local research-
ers have revealed another eight
potential sites nearby. “I think if
there was a reporter in every city
researching where African Amer-
ican burial grounds were, we’d see
this time and time again,” says ar-
chaeologist Joe Joseph.
Examples stretch beyond the
South. In 1991, Black New York-
ers voiced outrage when they
learned that hundreds of graves
were being excavated from a
17th- and 18th-century African
burial ground to make way for a
34-story federal office building
in lower Manhattan. Many felt
they hadn’t been properly con-
sulted, and the controversy led
to a redesign of the project with
more Black scholars included.
Among those spearheading the
research was Michael Blakey,
an anthropologist who was then
leading a lab at Howard Univer-
sity and is now director of theInstitute for Historical Biology
at the College of William and
Mary. “There were ethical obli-
gations to allow the community
its rights to determine whether
there would be research or not,”
Blakey recalls. The local descen-
dant communities he conferred
with felt the remains had an im-
portant story to tell, and came
up with the questions that would
guide the work: Where did the
deceased come from? What were
their lives like? In the absence of
archival records, the anthropol-
ogists were able to reconstruct
the geographic movements of
individuals— learning which were
born in New York and which
in Africa or the Caribbean, for
instance— based on signatures
of elements like strontium in the
bones, then a novel application of
isotopic analysis. They also docu-
mented that enslaved people in
the North suffered just as much
physical stress as those held on
Southern plantations.
Blakey led the type of collab-
orative study that regulations
governing cultural resource man-64 WINTER 2020 / POPSCI.COM
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