Post by shango on Dec 30, 2004 21:10:28 GMT -5
From the November 2003 Anthropology News
www.aaanet.org/press/an/0311ke-news.htm
Following the Remains of Enslaved Africans
Stacy Lathrop
Anthropology News
Slavery’s past was unearthed at 290 Broadway in New York City in 1991 during construction of a federal office building at Broadway and Duane Streets. This past month it was put to rest there once again. In probably the most significant reburial ceremony in New York City history, over 400 coffins containing the remains of enslaved Africans exhumed and analyzed at the W Montague Cobb Laboratory at Howard University were ceremonially reburied in the African Burial Ground Memorial Site, which in 1993 was designated a National Historic Landmark. The 18th-century colonial burial ground is the oldest and largest African descendent cemetery yet excavated in North America. As many as 20,000 people of African descent might have been buried there.
Reburial Ceremonies
Events marking the return of the human skeletal remains from Howard University in Washington, DC to their final resting place in New York City began in DC on September 30, and culminated with reburial ceremonies on the African Burial Ground Memorial Site. Following commemorative events in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia and Newark, a flotilla carrying the coffins of the final four human skeletal remains arrived October 3 in New York, at the Wall Street pier site of New York’s colonial slave market. Officials and dignitaries, including New York Mayor Bloomberg and poet Maya Angelou, joined them. Some thousand people then gathered as a procession formed and additional ancestors, all in coffins handmade in Ghana, joined the parade for a journey up through New York City’s “Canyon of Heroes” on lower Broadway to the original burial site. An all night vigil at the burial site followed before a morning interment ceremony on October 4.
Of course, this final journey has had its hurdles. After three years of stalled funding for the African Burial Ground, the US General Services Administration (GSA), under advisement of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and the National Park Service, returned to the negotiating table with Howard University in 2002.
Michael Blakey working at the African Burial Ground site, 1992. © Chester Higgins, Jr.
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In January 2003, GSA provided new funding to Howard University to produce final analyses and draft reports on skeletal biology, archaeology and history. Other initiatives that the GSA had left hanging since January of 2000 resumed at that time as well, including the construction of an Interpretive Center at 290 Broadway, the selection process to award one of five finalists a contract to build a memorial at the site, and funding for the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture to organize the reburial ceremony.
Life in Colonial New York
For the last decade, the bones and artifacts exhumed by archaeologists have revealed their stories to a multidisciplinary team of scholars at Howard University. During that time, researchers have produced a singular glimpse of the lives of slaves in the northern US. Michael Blakey, the director of the African Burial Ground Project, reports:
We now know, as a reasonable fact, that life for Africans in colonial New York was characterized by slavery, hard physical labor that enlarged and often tore muscles, high infant mortality, peculiarly high death rates for 15-25 year old people, many of whom had only recently arrived through the middle passage, with few living past 40 and almost none living past 55 years of age. The Europeans of New York exhibited the opposite of these trends in most respects. About 8 times as many English as Africans lived past 55 years of age. Those Africans who survived being born in New York had evidence of stunted and disrupted growth as children, and were exposed to lead pollution as much as 70 times that of the African born. The northern colonial city of New York was very similar in these respects to South Carolina and the Caribbean, to which New York’s economy was connected, and where we have long known conditions for African captives were among the harshest. These Africans came from warring states, wrestling with the European demand for human captives that included Calibar, Asante, Benin, Dahomey, Congo, Tuareg and many others. They resisted their enslavement through rebellion and they resisted their dehumanization by carefully burying their dead and preserving what they could of their cultures.
www.aaanet.org/press/an/0311ke-news.htm
Following the Remains of Enslaved Africans
Stacy Lathrop
Anthropology News
Slavery’s past was unearthed at 290 Broadway in New York City in 1991 during construction of a federal office building at Broadway and Duane Streets. This past month it was put to rest there once again. In probably the most significant reburial ceremony in New York City history, over 400 coffins containing the remains of enslaved Africans exhumed and analyzed at the W Montague Cobb Laboratory at Howard University were ceremonially reburied in the African Burial Ground Memorial Site, which in 1993 was designated a National Historic Landmark. The 18th-century colonial burial ground is the oldest and largest African descendent cemetery yet excavated in North America. As many as 20,000 people of African descent might have been buried there.
Reburial Ceremonies
Events marking the return of the human skeletal remains from Howard University in Washington, DC to their final resting place in New York City began in DC on September 30, and culminated with reburial ceremonies on the African Burial Ground Memorial Site. Following commemorative events in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia and Newark, a flotilla carrying the coffins of the final four human skeletal remains arrived October 3 in New York, at the Wall Street pier site of New York’s colonial slave market. Officials and dignitaries, including New York Mayor Bloomberg and poet Maya Angelou, joined them. Some thousand people then gathered as a procession formed and additional ancestors, all in coffins handmade in Ghana, joined the parade for a journey up through New York City’s “Canyon of Heroes” on lower Broadway to the original burial site. An all night vigil at the burial site followed before a morning interment ceremony on October 4.
Of course, this final journey has had its hurdles. After three years of stalled funding for the African Burial Ground, the US General Services Administration (GSA), under advisement of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and the National Park Service, returned to the negotiating table with Howard University in 2002.
Michael Blakey working at the African Burial Ground site, 1992. © Chester Higgins, Jr.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In January 2003, GSA provided new funding to Howard University to produce final analyses and draft reports on skeletal biology, archaeology and history. Other initiatives that the GSA had left hanging since January of 2000 resumed at that time as well, including the construction of an Interpretive Center at 290 Broadway, the selection process to award one of five finalists a contract to build a memorial at the site, and funding for the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture to organize the reburial ceremony.
Life in Colonial New York
For the last decade, the bones and artifacts exhumed by archaeologists have revealed their stories to a multidisciplinary team of scholars at Howard University. During that time, researchers have produced a singular glimpse of the lives of slaves in the northern US. Michael Blakey, the director of the African Burial Ground Project, reports:
We now know, as a reasonable fact, that life for Africans in colonial New York was characterized by slavery, hard physical labor that enlarged and often tore muscles, high infant mortality, peculiarly high death rates for 15-25 year old people, many of whom had only recently arrived through the middle passage, with few living past 40 and almost none living past 55 years of age. The Europeans of New York exhibited the opposite of these trends in most respects. About 8 times as many English as Africans lived past 55 years of age. Those Africans who survived being born in New York had evidence of stunted and disrupted growth as children, and were exposed to lead pollution as much as 70 times that of the African born. The northern colonial city of New York was very similar in these respects to South Carolina and the Caribbean, to which New York’s economy was connected, and where we have long known conditions for African captives were among the harshest. These Africans came from warring states, wrestling with the European demand for human captives that included Calibar, Asante, Benin, Dahomey, Congo, Tuareg and many others. They resisted their enslavement through rebellion and they resisted their dehumanization by carefully burying their dead and preserving what they could of their cultures.