Joseph Lloyd Manor located in Lloyd Harbor, NY and built in 1767, affords a rare opportunity to better understand how captive Africans formed communities on Long Island within and against slavery. Ongoing research is examining the lives of those who labored at the site through a combination of archaeology at the Manor's presumed slave quarter and a unique documentary record. In addition to extensive Lloyd family papers, the writings of Jupiter Hammon are available for analysis. Hammon, who was born into slavery in 1711 and lived his entire life as property of the Lloyds, is considered among the first published African American authors. Hammon's poetry and prose (see Ransom 1970) permits a comparison between his first-hand perspective on captivity and the material record left behind by other captive laborers who made up his immediate community at Lloyd Manor. Hammon's focus on Christian conversion and spirituality guide the direction of this research as it often takes the form of a dialogue with other captive Africans, the Lloyds and Phillis Wheatley. The Long Island Lloyds, a segment of a far-reaching and wealthy Atlantic merchant-planter family, employed captive African labor throughout the 18th century. Hammon was among 10 slaves were enumerated in the 1790 federal census of the site. Our research aims to collect information that will document the diversity of this community and reconstruct the broader local networks in which the Lloyd slaves were enmeshed.

Excavations are focused on a historic outbuilding depicted with a chimney on an 1814 map of the area. The location, size and shape of the structure and especially the chimney suggest a human presence, and based on the findings from our first season of research, we believe these persons were captive Africans. Initial work involved the excavation of seven one-by-one meter test units. These tests identified important subsurface remains of the small 18th century outbuilding detailed on the 1814 map and visually located through ruined surface remains of the brick chimney and its foundation stones. Well-preserved sections of the dry laid south- and east-facing stone foundation walls were uncovered (Figures 1 and 2). Associated displaced layers of foundation stones suggest structure walls collapsed outward after it was abandoned.

Figure 1. East-facing foundation wall showing interior builder's trench feature at the Joseph Lloyd Manor slave quarter 2007 excavations.

Figure 2. Hofstra University staff, students and volunteers excavating deposits surrounding south-facing foundation wall.

The structure's interior remains, foundation fragments, and fallen wall lay beneath several layers of mixed debris, soil and pebbles that eroded from the slope above. Removal of these layers uncovered a deposit capping significant cultural deposits and containing an 1828 half-cent coin (Figure 3). The date of this coin falls squarely within the time period we think this structure would have been occupied and indicates that the deposits associated with the architectural remains relate to the past occupants we wish to learn more about. Associated with the east-facing foundation fragment was an interior builders' trench containing material remains currently under analysis.

Figure 3. An 1828 half-cent coin.

A different trench was identified in front of the structure. This trench appeared intentionally filled with a deposit of oyster shell and large artifacts fragments. The size of these artifacts and intact state of most of the shell indicates this deposit is undisturbed. Large fragments of a finely molded white salt-glazed stoneware plate and the base of a wine-bottle provide a mid-18th century date. The trench was likely created to manage slope erosion and facilitate the displacement of rainwater away from the house. A complete turtle plastron found at the base of the trench may indicate use of local resources for a dietary supplement and when considered with other evidence may indicate other cultural practices. Being a boundary crossing creature, the buried turtle may also represent evidence of retained African religious beliefs associated with the occupation of this house and possibly a powerful form of resistance.

While additional research in upcoming years will examine this potential in detail, the preliminary findings confirm the occupation of this structure during the time when captive Africans made up the majority of the household's members and, therefore, that this structure was most likely home to at least some of the Lloyd family slaves. Future work will be focused on collecting data that will record efforts by residents to create freedoms in their everyday lives through various expressions of autonomy. Faunal and botanical remains will be identified for signs of supplemental food and medicine. Regional availability of these and other remains will be identified to better understand patterns of exploitation. How far residents were allowed to and capable of traveling off site to gather materials is of particular interest. These actions are expected to disclose the extent of connections between Lloyd family slaves and other people in the region, possibly revealing a larger network built by captive people to expand their horizon, improve their lives and by extension resist their captivity. This would require crossing boundaries predetermined by others, which were part of early New York's burgeoning political, religious and colonial identities and foundational to their enslavement. These boundary crossing efforts mirror those identified by archaeologists working throughout the African Diaspora and possibly symbolized at Lloyd Manor by the buried turtle plastron discussed above. In addition, these actions assert a form of self-mastery distinct from but in conversation with Hammon who wrote of embracing Christian conversion as the best means for seizing control.

Although our research is focused on the past, it occurs with in living communities in Long Island. By doing work founded upon shared interests in the local past we hope to provide tools these communities can use to direct their future. Archaeology contributes otherwise unrecorded diversity to our understanding of past captive African communities. Then instead of a myopic focus on captivity, we can also consider the incredible accomplishments of people whose past acts that form part of the foundation for our communities today. To this end Community Dialogues on history and archaeology with speakers on local African Diaspora research including Warren Perry, Kathleen Velsor and Thelma Jackson-Abidally are essential to the fabric of our work.

In the Spring of 2007, I scrapped my standard syllabus for my undergraduate Historical Archaeology Class. I had become increasingly dissatisfied with my course's evolution. While the content and structure were fine, and the students learned about the discipline of historical archaeology, I felt the course fell short of its educational potential. When I realized that 2007 was the 200th anniversary of the British empire's ban on the international slave trade as well as the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, I was inspired to adopt the slave trade and its consequences as my new theme.

Historical archaeology's greatest gift, I believe, is that it is entangled. I use this term in a similar manner to Ann Stahl, to imply both good and bad characteristics of the discipline. Archaeology generally entangles multiple academic subjects -- science and humanities, process and agency, symbol and behavior -- which is a wonderful thing in itself. Historical archaeology, however, also offers the entanglements derived from being the "archaeology of us." It ties students to the materiality of their lives and adds the depth of time, a point that needs no elaboration here. Archaeology's materiality also entangles people with each other because it represents a tangible connection to the past that eludes most high school history curricula. Historical archaeology creates empathy between people.

Because Michigan Technological University's student demographic profile is largely non-Hispanic White (81% +/- 4%) males (76%), and only 2% of our community identifies itself as "out" (4% nationally),[1] I decided that the anniversaries provided me the opportunity to devote my entire class to the archaeology of the African Diaspora. This subject would force students not only to confront new ideas about objects and symbolism, gender and culture, agency in history, behavior and perception, which had been standard parts of my class, but also confront "otherness" in self-critical and reflexive manner.

This was ambitious and idealistic on my part since this is not my area of expertise and I am currently undertaking no research in this area. I was nervous to present myself as an authority figure talking about African and African-American history and I knew that my students would see me as such even if I explained my intellectual process. I was not thrilled at the hours I would have to spend scanning images from books and searching the WWW for pictures to create lectures. As I thought about how I could present research conducted by others without implicating myself as a coauthor or collaborator, it occurred to me that I could just ask people to share their research directly with my class. I sent emails and made phone calls to my colleagues and asked who would be willing to share Powerpoint slide shows. The response from our community was heartening since everyone I asked shared, or offered to share, with me.

I set up the class to run in a relatively chronological manner. As a distribution-fulfilling class, the students come into the course with varied backgrounds. Most knew little to no anthropology per se, except what they learned in our interdisciplinary World Cultures class in the core studies program. Almost none of them knew anything about archaeology, so I began with introductions to archaeology and the idea of culture. This beginning also made Jim Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten a good introductory text. I complemented this with a detailed discussion of culture, race, and ethnicity, drawing heavily on the AAA's Race Project web pages. In addition, Carl Blair[2] gave an excellent guest lecture in which he overviewed the rise of complex societies in Africa, contextualizing regional relationships and the slave trade from the iron age to the early modern period.

I set the stage for the story of the Diaspora by describing Jamestown and her contemporary Spanish, French, Dutch and other settlements. I set this story within the rise of mercantile capitalism and Plantation America, a subject most of the students knew from World Cultures. From there I began presenting research projects contributed by my colleagues. I spoke first about the triangle trade and explained how underwater archaeology provides insight into the lived experiences of the middle passage. Both Jane Webster (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and Hannes Schroeder (Oxford University) sent Powerpoint lectures through which I could share their research with my class. These lectures became points of departure from which we discussed African adaptations to the ecological and social environments of the Americas, bioarchaeology, creolization and ethnicity, and the colonial world. The students began to read Theresa Singleton's edited volume, I, Too, am America. Those who know my research will not be surprised that I put some emphasis on both landscape archaeology and the story of colonoware.

By week 7 of the term, I transitioned into the post-colonial world. I hoped to make colonial and plantation experiences, which are very firmly established in "otherness" for a nineteen year old mid-westerner, into prelude to the stories of people and places closer to home. I made the transition with a discussion of gender, mothering, and medical practice. The students read The Archaeology of Mothering and Laurie Wilkie (University of California, Berkeley) generously sent slides for an accompanying lecture. This topic inspired much discussion and I had not anticipated the enthusiastic way white male engineering students would engage with the history of medical technology as the racialized and gendered practice that Wilkie wove into her narrative. This was an ideal example of the kind of entangled teachable moments created though historical archaeology.

Sarah Fayen and Jon Prown, from the Chipstone Foundation, provided me with a lecture to further punctuate the jump from the colonial world into the nineteenth century. The students' visited Chipstone's on-line version of their exhibit About Face: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the African American Image. I used the story of the Toussaint pitcher to explore the changing construction of race relations in America. This also resonated with my students for an unanticipated reason. They were surprised that such an exhibit would have originated at the Milwaukee Art Museum, as the students had not considered the decorative arts alongside the fine arts. Perhaps more importantly, they were also surprised because although many students were from Wisconsin, they had never considered the Milwaukee Art Museum as a center of African-American or Diaspora-related cultures and history.

I capitalized on that moment by extending our discussions of race and class from stories about African-American midwives and abolitionist potters to consider the archaeology of New York's Five Points neighborhood and the African Burying Ground. We made fruitful comparisons between the lives of African- and Irish- Americans during these weeks, taking full advantage of many on-line resources as well as a hearty critique of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. The students listened to a pod cast of Rebecca Yamin's (John Milner Associates) discussion with Marty Moss-Coaine at WHYY's RadioTimes and compared the archaeology, the movie, and the photographs of Jacob Riis. This activity, which I have used in several versions of this class, is an ideal tool to explore the relationships between representations of the past, academic inquiry, and the social tensions inherent in those activities.

We continued our explorations of the archaeology of African-American lives by connecting the 19th with the 20th century. I moved the class westward from New York, looking at studies of African-American loggers, the United States Colored Troops Civil War service, the Buffalo Soldiers in the west, and the African-American community in Nevada. The students read Boomtown Saloons and Kelly Dixon (University of Montana) also kindly provided slides for a guest lecture. In another unexpected teachable moment, the students connected the African- and Irish-American archaeologies in New York to the study of contemporary communities in Virginia City's western setting. Saloon archaeology was also a hit, but this was less of a surprise.

In wrapping up discussion, I wanted to bring home these archaeologies of African-American experiences. I wanted to try and somehow make them into "the archaeology of us" even though not a single person in my classroom identified any African heritage. I therefore concluded by considering the challenges that archaeology presents through the environmental justice movement, which resonates with civil and environmental engineers as much as students of the social sciences. I first explored the evolution of America's great mid-western cities, connecting historical and economic trends with their physical manifestations in urban geography. I used that perspective to consider the disaster that followed hurricane Katrina's demolition of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. This served as a timely and powerful conclusion to the class in which I could mix the work of Shannon Lee Dawdy with the personal experiences offered by my sister, who had served as a first responder in Mississippi after the disaster.

This course change made the generosity of the archaeological community clearly evident. Several other scholars offered material that I was able to include in presentations and discussions, and I am particularly indebted to Paul Mullins, Christopher Matthews, Mark Hauser, Nicholas Hanks, Christopher Espenshade, and Timothy Goddard and Paul Shackel, among others. I hope anyone I've neglected to mention will forgive my oversight. In their evaluations, the students mostly forgave the rough edges of my first time through this class and they also appreciated my colleagues' generosity. As one commented, "It was a great way to end, tying together all of it: the Five Points, the burying ground, and the saloons." Another advised me, "continue the guest lectures and presentations from other universities. I appreciate your efforts to do that." Those interested can visit the on-line syllabus to see the links and assigned readings, the changes between what I had hoped to do vs. what I actually did, download lecture outlines as pdfs, and follow the major activities described above at: http://www.ss.mtu.edu/faculty/Scarlett/Histarch/histarch2007.htm.

I certainly exposed the students to a world they neither knew nor understood and their exams made evident that they learned a great deal about archaeology. Next spring, I will certainly refine most of my presentations. The course needs to have the archaeological narratives balanced with more personal stories, so I will probably ask the students to read an ethnography or novel, such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. While I used the African Diaspora Archaeology Network's website as a resource, I did not direct my students to the site, nor did I provide direct links to articles and discussions in the ADAN's Newsletter. I also completely neglected the resources of the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery and The Archaeology Channel. Finally, I must find a way next year to assess whether or not I added some empathy to our campus community, entangling our students with experiences lived by others.

I realize now, after other experiments with pod casting and Skype's virtual office capabilities, how much collaborative potential is emerging in the teaching environment. I hope that others will explore similar avenues and perhaps even create a venue for more substantial collaborative work. Perhaps the African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, and the Archaeology Channel could collaboratively establish a teaching space to share such resources. The benefits could be extraordinary.

Grave Site Identification on St. John, Virgin Islands:
The Use of Grave Markers and Commemorative
Space during the Danish Colonial Period

By Helen Blouet*

Click on the figure numbers below to view the illustrations to this article.

The history of St. John is riddled with hierarchical divisions which reflected a well-defined class system (Figure 1). From 1718 to 1917, Danish and other European colonists developed plantation economies and maritime trade, both shaped by slave labor and social hierarchies that created inequalities among enslaved Africans, free white Europeans, and freed people of color (Dookhan 1974; Hall 1992). These disparities influenced a person's life and death. For example, burials of the enslaved were not often allowed in church cemeteries reserved for European colonists. Such separations caused people of African descent to create meaningful burial sites within their communities. This paper focuses on how people with varying degrees of power interacted with landscapes and material objects to create meaningful commemorative practices in plantation societies. On St. John and throughout the Caribbean and the world, cemeteries are important sites that contribute to a sense of belonging, heritage, and land ownership for the people who live and lived there (Aries 1974; Besson 2002; Brown 2006; Lenik 2004; Mytum 2004; Olwig 1985, 1994). Here I present how a selection of the Afro- and Euro-Caribbean peoples created, maintained, and changed burial practices and cemeteries within hierarchical racist, classist, and religious structures and landscapes. They used a variety of locations to commemorate the dead. The first cemeteries I present relate to a Danish landowning family. The second example is the cemetery of an early nineteenth century merchant and estate owner who moved from St. Thomas. These examples are followed by burial sites and cemeteries used by enslaved laborers and free people of color.

This paper is adapted from my larger research project that uses archaeological survey, documentary analysis, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications to interpret how social constructs of race, class, and religion impacted the creation, location, and use of memorials and grave sites (Figure 2). Unfortunately, several historic burial sites on St. John are not maintained and protected and many have been forgotten as families pass away, move off-island, or no longer wish to look after them. Furthermore, cemetery practices have changed and few people are buried in traditional plots on family land, without following proper legal codes (Department of Public Works, Virgin Islands Code, Title 19, § 2008). Instead, municipal and church cemeteries are the preferred and legal places for burial.

In the past, without the use of today's embalming practices, where ever burial took place, it had to be done soon after a person's death, regardless of race, class, or religion. Otherwise, the corpse would rapidly decay in the hot, tropical environment. Bodies were usually buried in the 24 hours that followed a person's death. Wealthy and poor individuals alike, free and enslaved, were buried in a number of locations, including family plots near dwellings or in some form of community cemetery. For example, the Hjardemaals, a well-to-do Danish family who owned Cinnamon Bay plantation in the early 19th century, maintained a family cemetery on a hill top just south of their home. Two tombs stand in the foreground and a row of five nameless tombs stand behind them. (Figures 3 & 4) One of the two tombs in the front bears an inscription for Mrs. Anna Margarethe Berner Hjardemaal, who passed away in 1836 (Figure 5a, 5b). It is believed that the nameless tomb beside her was intended for the body of her husband when he passed. However, Mr. Hjardemaal died in 1845 and was actually buried in the 'Danish' cemetery in the town of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, a short boat ride from St. John. The 'Danish' cemetery was reserved for prominent Danish and Lutheran colonists (Figure 6a, 6b). Here, Mr. Hjardemaal has a tomb made of red brick and marble that bears a unique inscription (Figure 7). Some of his children are also buried with him. It is evident here that the wealthy landowning Hjardemaal family utilized different but significant burial sites for family members. One location was the family cemetery on Cinnamon Bay Estate, and the other was an elite cemetery reserved for Danish families.

Colonists with less authority or power, including enslaved laborers, were also buried in a variety of places. At the Leinster Bay estate, for example, an estate cemetery lies on a ridge overlooking Leinster Bay and an abandoned sugar factory (Figure 8). Six graves lie in a rough line going up the hill. They vary in design, quality, and preservation. The grave closest to the bottom of the ridge belongs to James E. Murphy (Figure 9), a land owner who came from St. Thomas in the 19th century and soon became prosperous on St. John. His grave on the ridge is marked by a brick and stone rectangular vault and enclosed by a brick wall (Figure 10a, 10b). His name and date of death in 1809 is inscribed on a marble slab, although the date is incorrect and he actually passed away in 1808 (Figure 11) (Knight 2001).

At the top of the ridge lie a few grave markers in different states of preservation. The one pictured in Figure 12 is a brick rectangular vault with no name or wall surrounding it. The remaining graves in the area are marked by nameless brick vaults and piles of brick and stone. These could mark the burials of family members, overseers, servants, or even favored slaves who lived or worked on the property. It is possible that the placement of these burials with that of James Murphy's was meant to reflect a familial or working relationship between people with different quality burial markers and potentially different social statuses. Furthermore, the cemetery at Leinster Bay reflects an association between the deceased who lived there and the land they owned and worked.

Burial sites for enslaved laborers have been identified throughout the Caribbean, including the following locations on St. John. Burials at Adrian Estate were discovered during excavations by Elizabeth Kellar (2003) in the completion of her dissertation research. The burials were encountered under what used to be house floors and gardens of dwellings for the enslaved who lived on the estate. At Lameshur Estate along the beach (Figure 13), unmarked burials near a few tamarind trees were discovered by the National Park Service during the construction of a bathroom stall. According to the skeletal, artifactual, and documentary evidence noted by Ken Wild in 1989, these burials may have been for enslaved or free laborers (Wild 1989).

A burial ground at Cinnamon Bay beach has been identified through documentary analysis and through the discovery of skeletal remains occasionally washing out of the sands during rough wave activity and intense storms. Freed laborers who fell victim to the cholera epidemic in the 1850s were buried here according to documentation (Ivinson 1854), and given the higher than expected amount of human remains that have washed out thus far, National Park archaeologist Ken Wild believes it is possible that enslaved laborers were buried here prior to 1848 (Ken Wild, personal communication, June 2004).

Other sites that may contain formerly enslaved laborers are possible cemeteries at Bordeaux Mountain and L'Esperance. It has been reported by local archaeologists and historians that on occasion, human skeletal remains have washed out of the banks and ridges at these sites (David Knight and Ken Wild, personal communication, June 2004). At Bordeaux (Figure 14), conch shells, piles of stone, and a huge kapok, or silk cotton tree, are present. These objects are thought to be characteristic of grave markers for enslaved and free inhabitants of St. John and the Virgin Islands, and with their placement near slave communities they possibly symbolized belonging to the land, family relationships, and community heritage. (Figure 15).

L'Esperance Estate possesses what looks to be a rectangular grave marker that lies outside of the estate cemetery walls. Inside the estate cemetery at L'Esperance is the grave of Mr. Tonis (Figure 16), an owner of the estate in the early 18th century. Five grave markers bearing no names lie with his (Figure 17), and these could be family members, employees, and/or laborers. The marker outside the walls may be that of an enslaved laborer, because it bears no name or date of death and it is in proximity to the slave laborer village remains. Furthermore, its placement suggests that it once overlooked an open space that, according to 18th century Moravian missionary, C.G.A. Oldendorp (1987[1777]), was the site of Moravian meetings and worship for the slaves on the estate (Figure 18).

Churches were also important places of burial on St. John. Burials in the Lutheran and Moravian churchyards, two of the most popular congregations on St. John in the 18th and 19th centuries, symbolized a person's religious devotion and church membership. Churchyard burials were often restricted to European church members. However, church mortuary records indicate that some enslaved African members were buried in the churchyards or on church property, while the majority was buried on the estates where they lived (Moravian Burial Records, Emmaus Church, St. John, 1833-1881). The churchyards at Bethany and Emmaus Moravian churches and the Nazareth Lutheran churchyard may contain deceased enslaved laborers, although there are no definite grave markers or diagnostics to support this. Possible markers for the enslaved may be informal piles of stone present in the churchyards (Figures 19 and 20). It is also possible that slave burials may not have been marked in the churchyard, making them imperceptible above ground.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, race, class, and religion still impacted the commemorative markers of people of European and African descent, while the types of locations remained similar. Reef Bay estate possesses a cemetery south of the estate buildings, between the sugar factory and the ocean's edge. Numerous adult tamarind trees, some blown over by hurricane winds, grow around the burials. A collection of 8-10 marked burials have been identified, most of which are informal markers of coarse and un-worked stone that outline the burial (Figure 21). Additionally, some markers are piles of coarse stone (Figure 22). It is possible that enslaved laborers were buried here, but there is better evidence for the burials of freed people of color.

One burial sticks out from the crowd at the Reef Bay cemetery (Figure 23). It is the only one to possess a formal masonry marker with an inscription. The inscription bears the name of William Marsh who owned the Reef Bay estate in the late 19th century and early 20th century. He was a descendent of the mixed race Marsh family who moved from Tortola to St. John in the nineteenth century. William Marsh passed away in 1909, and he is commemorated in the cemetery by a rectangular monument with an erect Christian cross on the marker's west end. Marsh is also said to be accompanied in the cemetery by two daughters, whose graves are outlined by coarse field stone. Their markers do not possess names or inscriptions. The other nameless burials could be family members and laborers of the estate. A similar example lies in the cemetery for the Beverhoudt family in Cruz Bay, the main town of St. John. This cemetery, used by people of color, now stands on a hill behind a popular restaurant called the Banana Deck. A thick brick wall with one entrance surrounds the 6 graves inside, all made of brick, mortar, and stone (Figure 24). It appears that the 6 burials are members of the same family and/or unit. The marker pictured here does not bear a name but possesses a Christian cross (Figure 25). Only two graves bear names and inscriptions, one for Ann L. Beverhoudt, d. 1879, the other for Sarah Elizabeth Martin (Figure 26a, 26b), d. 1858. In addition, a seventh nameless burial, marked by a rectangular vault, stands outside the cemetery wall, suggesting that this burial may be for a person who was excluded or distinguished from the other burials. Perhaps this wasn't a relative and instead, this was the grave of a family employee. On the other hand, the cemetery walls enclose a relatively small space and the seventh marker may be for a family member who passed away after the cemetery became full.

The Reef Bay and Beverhoudt estate cemeteries are similar to the Leinster estate cemetery containing James Murphy's grave mentioned earlier because they contain the prosperous landowner as well as possible family members, employees, and laborers. However, James Murphy was a Euro-Caribbean landowner while William Marsh and the Beverhoudts were landowners of color. As living members of the St. John community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, free people of color increasingly owned land (Hall 1992). In addition, some had access to more durable burial markers, such as brick, stone, and marble, and had more freedom to bury their dead on their properties, in churchyards, and in public cemeteries. With respect to the Reef Bay and Beverhoudt estate cemeteries, the two burial sites possess ornate markers for the estate owners, regardless of race and gender, and more modest ones for family members, employees, and/or laborers. The above cases, however, do not appear to be common for free people of African descent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While this may be based on community and/or cultural preferences, several contemporaneous markers were made of unworked local stone, probably because it was accessible in the landscape to a free population that still struggled economically and did not purchase commercial and mass-produced grave markers advertised in newspapers and business listings such as the Lightbourn West India Annual and Commercial Directories.

To conclude, Karen Olwig's (1985, 1994) interviews with St. John natives who grew up in the early 20th century revealed that many burial sites for family members, often on family property, provided a sense of belonging and heritage. Similar information has been obtained for different groups around the world, including Afro-Jamaican communities (Besson 2002; Brown 2006), 19th century Jewish communities on Nevis (Gradwohl 1998; Terrell 2005), and European and North American societies in the 18th and 19th centuries (Aries 1974; Mytum 2004). With respect to Afro- and Euro-Caribbean peoples on St. John, the landscapes and locations of the markers within the cemeteries mentioned in this paper suggests that while the presence, nature, and lack of burial markers was largely dependent on a person's access to commemorative marker materials, the locations had significance for family heritage, community belonging, a sense of security, and religious commitments and beliefs. Although marker materials may have changed for some people of color after emancipation, burial locations continued to be diverse. Based on the evidence, people buried their family, friends, and associates in accessible areas near the deceased's dwellings or in a community cemetery. Since many people did not have access to durable and lasting burial markers over time, evidence suggests that a burial's location in the landscape conveyed significant symbolism that honored the dead.

I wish to thank the following for their continued support of this project: Doug Armstrong and the Anthropology Department at Syracuse Unviersity (SU); SU Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; SU Program on Latin America and the Caribbean; the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA; The Von Scholten Archives, St. Thomas; Ken Wild, Virgin Islands National Park; Friends of the National Park; David Brewer, V.I. Department of Natural Resources and Historic Preservation; Elroy Sprauve; Guy Benjamin; Eulita Jacobs; Chuch and Terry Pishko; David Knight; Athena and Jay Swartley, and the St. John Community.

Sixteen years after the remains of more than 400 enslaved and free Africans were unearthed in Lower Manhattan, a new monument will open to the public on Friday to honor a place once called the Negroes Burial Ground.

The memorial, the African Burial Ground National Monument, designates the burial site of the remains, which were discovered in 1991 by workers excavating the foundation for the Ted Weiss Federal Building at 290 Broadway.

Photograph by Tina Fineberg / Associated Press. Workers put final touches on the African Burial Ground National Monument on Monday [Oct. 1].

Commissioned by the federal government in 2005 at a cost of $5 million, the monument stands on a fraction of the 6.6 acres of burial ground where, according to historians and archaeologists, 15,000 to 20,000 people of African descent were laid to rest in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is the oldest and largest such burial site in North America, according to the National Park Service. Last year, President Bush proclaimed the site a national monument.

The monument will open to the public with a ceremony at 1 p.m. Friday, followed at 8 p.m. with a candelight procession from Battery Park to the monument at Duane and Elk Streets.

Rodney Léon, 38, a Brooklyn-born architect with the firm Aarris Architects of Manhattan, designed the monument, whose granite slabs rise in acute angles to enclose visitors in the hull-like Ancestral Chamber. An opening in the chamber, straddled by two reflecting pools, leads to a sunken circular court, where voices echo off of walls inscribed with symbols and scriptures.

Down a spiraling ramp is the Ancestral Libation Court, the centerpiece. A map of the world, centered on West Africa, is carved into the floor in gray and black granite, along with the archaeological notations made from the 1991 findings.

There also is a landscaped garden with seven mounds that mark the burial place of seven wooden crypts containing the remains.

"This is an important milestone in the whole memorialization process," said Howard Dodson, one of the early leaders in the development of the memorial and the chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. "The ancestors are being treated with dignity, and the monument is part of asserting their humanity and their contribution to this city."

Engraved on the main granite wall are the words: "For all those who were lost/ For all those who were stolen/ For all those who were left behind/ For all those who are not forgotten."

This week the Smithsonian Institution opened a new museum -- online. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian's nineteenth and newest museum, opened on the Web as a virtual collection for scholarship and education. The NMAAHC's building on the Smithsonian Mall in Washington, D.C. will not be completed until 2012. This is the first time a major museum has opened a virtual presence before erecting the tangible structure.

The Web museum highlights a collection called "Let Your Motto Be Resistance," portraits and photographs of people who stood against oppression in various ways, from Frederick Douglass to Ella Fitzgerald to Malcolm X.

The NMAAHC website also has a "Memory Book," which enables site visitors to upload their memories in the form of stories, images, or audio recordings. An online map, which users can navigate, shows how these diverse memories are linked to each other and to content created by the museum to spotlight people, places, issues, and moments in African-American history. This virtual museum of African-American History is available at http://nmaahc.si.edu/.

1807 Commemorated: Website Launch

1807 Commemorated is launching a new website in December 2007 which addresses the issues and concerns regarding the portrayal of enslavement and abolition in museums in Britain. Containing discussion points, interviews, articles and information regarding the project's activities, it forms a valuable resource for an understudied topic: http://www.history.ac.uk/1807commemorated/.

1807 Commemorated is a research project at the University of York, which seeks to understand the commemorative processes, politics of dissonance, recognition, representation and identity work that has taken place in museums throughout Britain as the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade is marked. Working with six national museums in the UK the project seeks to understand how the representation of enslavement, abolition, legacies and the Diaspora inform notions of identity, whether, individual, community, regional or national. Based upon a three-fold examination of the wider societal context of the bicentenary, displays at museums and art galleries across the country and large-scale audience surveys carried out at the project’s partner museums, the project will assess the production, dissemination and consumption of the anniversary.

The wider aim of the project is to address how traumatic histories such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the African Diaspora can be relayed to a diverse public in museum displays and exhibitions. The painful memories of the past, of brutality and exploitation are explored and focused upon as the project builds practical examples for museum practitioners and academics using data collected from audience responses.

New York, NY (October 3, 2007) -- Christopher Leslie Brown, Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University, has been selected as the winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded for the best book on slavery or abolition. Brown won for his book, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press). The book examines the origins of abolitionism in Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. The prize is awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

In addition to Brown, the other two finalists for the prize were Matt D. Childs for The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery (University of North Carolina Press); and Cassandra Pybus for Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Freedom (Beacon Press). The $25,000 annual award is the most generous history prize in the field. The prize will be presented to Brown at a dinner in New York City in February 2008.

This year's finalists were selected from a field of over seventy entries by a jury of scholars that included Laurent Dubois (Duke University), Leslie Harris (Emory University), and Stephanie McCurry (University of Pennsylvania). The winner was selected by a review committee of representatives from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Yale University.

"Christopher Brown's Moral Capital resets the terrain for understanding the origins and effectiveness of British efforts to end slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries," says McCurry, the Merriam Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. "Moral Capital not only provides an important new argument about British anti-slavery, but also highlights the nature of the relationship between moral sensibility and political activism at any time."

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books. Previous winners were Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004; Laurent Dubois, 2005; and Rebecca J. Scott, 2006.

The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the 19th century.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a part of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, was launched in November 1998 through a generous donation by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, especially the chattel slave system and its destruction. The Center seeks to foster an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the founding of the modern world by promoting interaction and exchange between scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications, educational outreach, and other programs and events.

2007 has been a busy year for the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). The archive, which facilitates the archaeological study of slave societies that evolved in the Atlantic World, gives scholars easy internet access to detailed, comparable data from slave-quarter sites across the Chesapeake and Caribbean regions. By using a single set of classification and measurement protocols, the archive makes possible systematic, quantitative comparisons among assemblages from multiple sites. DAACS is also committed to developing analytical methods and innovative research programs to decipher the historical meaning of archaeological evidence.

Since January, archaeological data and historical background information from two slave quarter sites in Maryland, seven sites on Jamaica and two sites on Nevis have been made available to researchers and the public through http://www.daacs.org. These 11 sites include work conducted by Barry Higman at Montpelier Plantation in St. James Parish, Jamaica as well as Douglas Armstrong's excavations at Seville Plantation, in St. Ann, Jamaica. These sites join twenty-one excavated quarter sites from Virginia. DAACS currently contains detailed, standardized data on over 1 million artifacts and 13,000 archaeological contexts from 32 excavated slave-quarter sites in the Chesapeake and Caribbean regions.

In 2008, DAACS turns its attention to South Carolina. Please watch for the launch of data from Leland Ferguson's excavations at Middleburg Plantation in early 2008. Data from Yaughan and Curriboo Plantations will be made available in late 2008. Addition sites from Virginia and Jamaica will also be launched in 2008. Please contact Jillian Galle (jgalle@monticello.org) if you would like to contribute sites or if you would like to consider using the DAACS database for your collections.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Thomas Jefferson's historic home at Monticello, is pleased to announce a program of short-term residential fellowships and travel grants at its International Center for Jefferson Studies open to all scholars working on Jefferson projects. Several of these fellowships are reserved for archaeologists whose work focuses on issues of slavery in the greater Chesapeake region, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean and whose work would benefit from the use of the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. For more information on the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, please see http://www.daacs.org. Foreign nationals are particularly encouraged to apply.

Short-term fellowships are awarded for periods of up to four months to doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars from any country. Awards carry a monthly stipend of $1,500 for United States and Canadian fellows plus pre-approved round-trip airfare, and $2,000 for overseas fellows plus airfare. Residential accommodation may be available on a limited basis. Fellows are expected to be in residence at the Center during the course of the fellowship, and no awards are made for work carried on elsewhere. Fellows have access to Monticello's expert staff and research holdings as well as to the extensive resources of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. ICJS/DAACS fellows will be provided with workspace as well as access to computers and Archive staff. Applicants should submit four copies of (1) a succinct description of the research project, including how Archive data will be used (500-words), and (2) a curriculum vitae. In addition, please arrange for three references to be sent directly to the Center at the address below.

Deadline for Applications: April 1, 2008. Applications and references should be addressed to the Fellowship Committee, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello, Post Office Box 316, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902, USA, Attention: Jillian Galle. Announcement of awards will be made no later than May 1, 2008. Application questions should be addressed to Jillian Galle, Project Manager, The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, 434-984-9873. The fellowship and grants program is underwritten by endowments established for this purpose by the Batten Foundation and First Union National Bank of Virginia, and by a generous grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation.

The Archaeology of Sugar and Slavery in Colonial Jamaica

University of Virginia-DAACS Field School in Historical Archaeology:
The Archaeology of Sugar and Slavery in Colonial Jamaica

The 2008 DAACS-University of Virginia Field School in Historical Archaeology, The Archaeology of Sugar and Slavery in Colonial Jamaica (Anth 382) offers a unique field school experience for advanced undergraduate and graduate students from universities throughout the United States and Caribbean. This field school provides students with a solid grounding in archaeological field and laboratory methods, with a specific focus on understanding slavery in the culturally diverse and economically complex context of the Caribbean through the archaeological record.

The goals of this course are threefold. First, students will learn archaeological survey methods, basic excavation techniques and field recording methods through daily field work on two 18th-century slave villages, each located on the campus of the University of West Indies, Mona, outside of Kingston, Jamaica. Second, regular participation in laboratory activities will expose students to 18th and 19th century material culture and provide the basis for analytical exercises that use the archaeological data to make concrete arguments about people living at the Papine and Mona villages. Finally, students will be exposed to collaborative interdisciplinary research through lectures, tours, and field recording projects with faculty from the University of the West Indies, the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, Colonial Williamsburg, and Monticello. Students will have the opportunity to travel throughout Jamaica through supervised weekly field trips and architectural field recording projects off campus.