NEWS & PUBLICATIONS

In the fall of 1991, a construction crew erecting a government office building in News York City for the General Services Administration stumbled upon the remains of 419 Africans from the 17th and 18th centuries. Construction was halted so that archaeologists, anthropologists, and experts in black history could investigate the site. Their work revealed details of the lives of thousands of Africans who had been enslaved in the region under Dutch rule and, later, British rule, years before the land would be called “the United States of America.”

“Most people don’t associate slavery with New York or the north for that matter,” says Tara Morrison, Park Service project manager for the African Burial Ground. “So, from the beginning, there was a tremendous amount of public interest in the site, not only from members of the New York and African descendant community but also from scholars who understood the value and importance of the site and demanded that it should be preserved appropriately. With estimates of 10,000 to 20,000 people buried in this seven-acre burial ground, it’s considered the largest known site of its kind in the United States.”

The land was designated a national historic landmark in April 1993. This February, President George W. Bush designated it a national monument, making it the 390th unit of the park system. Before this discovery, the largest burial ground previously discovered contained only 140 individuals. Most skeletal remains of African slave populations in North American contain only a handful of individuals buried on former plantations in the South, unearthed during construction of a road or swimming pool. Because blacks in urban areas were generally banned from burying their dead in Christian church yards, New York is the first such burial ground to reveal such deep layers of our nation’s history.

As bulldozers made way for trowels and brushes of archaeologists, hundreds of PhDs, students, and technicians logged more than 250,000 observations in an anthropological database, captured 25,000 digital photographs, and recorded nearly 2,000 x-rays to compare the remains against archival skeletal collections of known origin.

“Most of these slaves were from west and central Africa, and though they had very little material goods in their coffins, they had some dramatic representations of their sense of themselves as African people with specific cultures and some interesting representations of their ambiguity about their own identities,” says Michael Blakey, scientific director for the project and now a professor of anthropology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Blakey’s analysis of human skeletal remains revealed that these men and women faced brutal working conditions, premature rates of mortality, and excessive workloads, while nutritional deficiencies were common among young children. It’s now clear how much local merchants relied on slave laborers to operate the bustling port and to work in trades such as shipbuilding, construction, domestic labor, and farming.

“For many people in the African American community, the African Burial Ground was an unsurprising surprise,” says Blakey. “Many textbooks say that Africans arrived in significant numbers in the early 19th century, and here we’ve found a site representing perhaps 15,000 burials of Africans who were there from the second year of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, making up perhaps 40 percent of that population and 20 percent of New York’s population on the eve of the Revolutionary War. These people helped build the city and were involved in many aspects of its economy and social life, almost entirely as enslaved people. The centrality of slavery in New York was not just overlooked but covered up—you couldn’t ask for a more glaring example. It took finding the actual bodies of these people en masse to give any veracity to the fact that slavery existed in the north as well as the south.”

But that story is now being told. The archaeologists have long since completed their site work and reinterred the bodies, and the federal office building has since been constructed adjacent to the burial ground. While work on a permanent memorial continues, visitors can enter the General Services Administration building at 290 Broadway and gain access to information, see the site, and view artwork commissioned for the building’s lobby. Construction on the memorial itself is expected to continue until 2008, when more extensive interpretation programs should be unveiled. For more information, visit www.africanburialground.gov.

Scott Kirkwood is senior editor for National Parks magazine.