In 1991, the United States General Services Administration began to excavate a portion of property that contained New York’s African Burial Ground—ignoring or failing to comply with regulations that required public comment and influence in how the site was to be preserved. By the time the Mayor of New York, the first African American to hold that position, and the community managed to shut the project down, 412 skeletons had already been removed. Permission was eventually granted for the remains to be studied prior to reburial, and Howard University, the most prestigious black university, was chosen to complete the study.
One of the objects of the study was to determine where these people came from prior to being slaves in New York. The study determined that at least one third of slaves buried in the African burial ground came directly from the African continent, the remainder enslaved in the Caribbean for a time prior to coming to New York. Work done to determine where in Africa these individuals came from was partially based on analysis of ten different styles of dental modification found within the burial ground, which largely still needs to be compared with ethnographic examples. At the time of publishing (1998), it was believed that the styles were similar to Ashanti and central African skulls. One woman in particular was buried with a string of 111 glass beads and cowrie shells, suggesting that she belonged to an Akan-speaking society that typically buries beads like these with their owner. One heart-shaped symbol in particular is telling because it is believed to be the Sankofa, a symbol that is specifically Akan. The symbol was made by pounding shiny tacs into the coffin’s surface. The links to Akan-speaking peoples match up with historical documents kept by the English, which list these people among those who were brought to New York as slaves.
The study also sought to learn about the physical quality of life that these people had under slavery, and the results are grim. Nearly one half of the population represented in the burial ground died in childhood, 40% of which were infants, nearly twice the rate of the Colonial English infant mortality rate (that ratio is still the same today). Half of those children showed evidence of metabolic disease, most commonly anemia. Children 2-12 years of age had bone growth that lagged two years behind their ages associated with dental development, and 60% of the children had developmental defects in their dental enamel, evidence of malnutrition and disease.
Comparative studies of numbers of adults who showed dental markers of malnutrition showed that New York’s adult slaves were generally better off than other slave populations, more specifically from South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Philadelphia plantations, possibly because a large percentage of the eighteenth century population spent their childhood in African societies—evidence of a higher quality of life in Africa than as slaves. Adult bones showed evidence of heavy muscle strain, most likely through heavy lifting and carrying on the head.
Evidence of resistance is harder to come by than evidence of a rough life, but there is one 22-year old woman who was found with a musket ball in her ribs, and comparisons showed that she was shot in the back. She had multiple fractures on her lower face, evidence of blunt force, and her arm appears to have been broken due to being twisted. None of these breaks show evidence of healing.
The African Burial ground and its modern story is a grim reminder that there is history underneath us—often brutal and violent, in places we least expect. And the callous treatment by the government of a site with human burials shows us that legislation put in place to protect sites and involve descendant communities in issues of preservation and the question of whether to excavate at all are often ignored and easily sidestepped.
