PSU Magazine Spring 1999

Upholstery tacks formed a heart design, thought to be a Ghanaian sankofa symbol, on the lid of this coffin. (Photos furnished by the U.S. General Services Administration.) established-was the most oppress ive for Africans," Dr. Sherrill Wilson , director of the Liaison Office of the African Burial Ground and Five Points Archaeological Project, has said. "It is also the period about which we know the least. Now we have an opportunity to obtain information directly from the remains. This is as close as we're going to come to having a firsthand account." Researchers will examine the over– lap between ground truth, the histori– cal record, and cultural records that Agorsah and others can reveal. A scant historical record sets the stage for their research. In 1626, Dutch captors hustled 11 Africans ashore at New Amsterdam, the Netherlands' two-year-old colony on Lower Manhattan Island. These men became the first slaves in what would . one day be New York City. In the begin– ning, slaves were typically buried within the ceme– tery used by whites-often in a reserved section of the plot belonging to their owners. But by 1696, non– whites were prohibited from being buried within the city limits. Residents of African descent began interring their loved ones in a swampy ravine just outside the city boundary. For the next hundred years, the bucolic site offered final repose to slaves and free persons of African heritage. By the beginning of the 1800s, the city was bulging northward. Needing more buildable land, white residents began filling in older sections of the marshy ravine site of the burial ground and constructing homes and businesses atop the fill. In time the graveyard was forgotten , but the 35-foot layer of fill dirt protected the burial ground until the modem era, when the deep foot– ings required by skyscrapers began to be excavated. c:--:1 he 427 human remains I.I unearthed to date are being studied by physical anthropologists at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Heading the project is Michael Blakely, who notes that the remains could well be ancestral to African Americans throughout the nation and could provide a unique opportunity to restore "our knowledge of ourselves." Certain inherited bone formations can reveal an individual's region of origin. Cavities in the teeth tell some– thing about diet. Wear and tear on joints provides indications of the type and rigor of the work the individual did. But the bones also raise questions. Does abnormal tooth enamel on chil– dren ind icate lack of milk?Soft , deformed bones indicate the condition known as rickets. Was it caused by inadequate nutrition or lack of sunlight ? If sufficiently well preserved, bones can yield DNA to determine the blood group of the individual and other · genetic markers. Agorsah and Blakely will travel to African museums to collect DNA samples from skeletal remains from the same period to provide a match group for the New York C ity remains. Scrutiny of the burial patterns and 560 burial artifacts-buttons, beads, cuff links, shroud pins, glass fragments, shells and pottery-by Agorsah and others will help fill in the historical record on how diverse cultures among the African diaspora merged and how that combined culture merged with European culture. For instance, the African diaspora in Suriname uses objects to determine cause of death. They bur the objects with the dead. Some groups bury grave goods with the dead; others don't, but sacrifice animals at burial. Still other groups put atop a grave ceremonial objects that later sink down into the earth. "We're looking for all these things," says Agorsah . "The remnants of those behaviors." The African Burial Ground is providing many interesting traces for researchers to investigate. Tiny metal fragments found in a grave with the bones of a tall African descendant proved to be buttons from a British naval uniform. During the Revolutionary War, England offered ";. SPRING 1999 PSU MAGAZINE 9