Mapping Post-Mortem Segregation

Where were Cambridge’s enslaved persons of African origin/descent buried? How were they treated in death? Does the small number of headstones of “negro servants” in the Old Burying Ground accurately represent their numerical presence in Colonial Cambridge society? How was the institution of slavery connected to the persons buried in the Old Burying Ground, Harvard-affiliated and otherwise?

Compared to the white Colonial settler population, Black residents of Colonial Cambridge are currently nearly invisible in death; only two headstones are known to mark the gravesites of “negro servants” at present. Yet the documentary record shows that there were many more enslaved persons living and working in Cambridge and at Harvard. What become of them in death? Can we find them and give them the same visibility afforded to white colonists? 

We hypothesize that they are still with us in Cambridge. Spatial analysis of Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground shows that both of the two known burials of “negro servants,” Cicely (1714) and Jane (1741), were both placed on the northwestern extremity of the burial grounds, and in both cases very far away from their enslavers and their families (Rev. William Brattle in the case of Cicely, and Andrew Bordman in the case of Jane). This analysis demonstrates that enslaved Africans were marginalized in both life and in death. 

The analysis also reveals that at the time of burial of both Cicely and Jane, this part of the Burying Ground was vacant of other headstones; the few that line the far northwestern edges are all later and also marginalized in various ways (especially children) and without local family ties (e.g., a French ship captain, a person from another Massachusetts town). We hypothesize, however, that this area is not actually vacant; we suspect that it contains the graves of many marginalized persons who either did not get a formal headstone or who had markers made out of perishable or non-durable materials.  

To answer these questions, we propose to bring the tools of historical archaeology, spatial analysis, and archaeological remote sensing to Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground. We propose to do this research under the auspices of the  Presidential Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery , announced by Harvard President Larry Bacow in November of 2019 and anchored at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

• Dr.  Aja Lans  (Fellow in the Inequality in America Initiative), historical archaeologist/ bioarchaeologist
• Prof.  Jason Ur  (Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology, department of Anthropology), landscape archaeologist and geospatial analyst;
•  Andrew Bair  (3 ^rd  year graduate student in Archaeology, department of Anthropology); archaeological geophysicist and landscape archaeologist;
• Harvard College and GSAS students in various concentrations and programs;
•  Cristine Hutchinson-Jones  (Project Manager for the Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute) and relevant affiliates of the Initiative;
• Charles Sullivan (Executive Director) and other relevant persons in the Cambridge Historical Commission
• Interested community members of the City of Cambridge, especially those who identify as descendants

Burial grounds provide insight into communities’ ideas regarding memorialization and religion, as well as various aspects of social identity (Baugher and Veit 2014; Hallam and Hockey 2001). The study of such spaces requires an interdisciplinary approach, commonly drawing on methodology and theory from the fields of archaeology, art, folklore, literature, and geography. Archaeologists have long studied burial grounds and human interments to better understand how traits such as socioeconomic status, gender, and ethnicity were physically embodied, symbolically represented, and made permanent upon bodily death. Here, we focus on what can be learned about life in colonial and early republic Cambridge, Massachusetts, from an analysis of the Old Burying Ground, with a particular focus on race relations.

The Old Burying Ground presents a unique opportunity for study, much of which is owed to its preservation. Preservation laws often vary at the state level, and often few protections existed for sites such as burial grounds (Baugher and Veit 2014; King 2000; Barnes 2011). Given the complex history of colonization and slavery in the United States, the resting places of Black, Indigenous, incarcerated, and impoverished Americans are often put at risk. However, in this instance, we have a space where people from many different walks of life come together. The site’s endurance is most certainly due to the presence of wealthy colonial families and individuals who were largely deemed worth of remembrance and protection. The presence of two marked graves of enslaved women, Jane (d. 1714) and Cicely (d. 1741), as well as a memorial to Black American Revolutionary War veterans, makes it obvious that the interments at the Burying Ground do not represent a homogenous group of people. This is where our research enters.

There are many myths about the condition of Black life in the northern United States, and especially in New England. For many years, it was argued that slavery in New England took a gentler form than that of the South and Caribbean (Ceppi 2018; Garman 1994). Further, the myth of Northern superiority, wherein Black people were not subject to as much discrimination and oppression is false (Kelley and Lewis 2005). Initially when viewing the Old Burying Ground, the presence of Jane and Cicely might be used to bolster such notions of equality, when in fact they prove the exact opposite.

Archaeologist Ian Hodder (1982) outlined basic societal interpretations archaeologists might make by studying burials, which to this day serve as a solid starting point for analyses. Burial rituals have the potential to distort or obscure certain social relationships (Quinn and Beck 2016). But in some contexts, burial differentiation accurately reflects social differentiation. In the case of the Old Burying Ground, at first glance we might view Jane and Cicely as equals with the others buried in the cemetery. However, their placement on the burial ground, the size of their gravestones, and the epitaphs on the stones reveal how they were marginalized in both life and death.

The burial places of enslaved individuals were often spatially separated from those of white people (Baugher and Veit 2014). Particularly in colonial New England, it was not uncommon for both enslaved and free Black people, poor people, and those considered to be outsiders to be buried on the margins of community burial grounds. Possessive paternalism likely motivated some enslavers to purchase headstones for their human property, which is reflected in epitaphs that assert ownership over the deceased (Baugher and Veit 2014; Jamieson 1995). Their markers tend to be smaller than those of white graves, and the epitaphs upheld notions of faithfulness and loyalty while erasing an enslaved person’s ties to their own family and arguably their claims to humanity. As Angelika Krüger-Kahloula (1989: 33) points out, “memorials offered white patrons the last opportunity to define black identities.”

Spatial analysis of Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground shows that both known burials of “negro servants,” Cicely and Jane, were placed on the northwestern extremity of the burial grounds, far from their enslavers and their families (Rev. William Brattle in the case of Cicely, and Andrew Bordman in the case of Jane). The analysis also reveals that at the time of burial of both Cicely and Jane, this part of the Burying Ground was vacant of other headstones; the few that line the far northwestern edges are all later and belong to individuals who were marginalized in various ways, such as children and those without local family ties (e.g., a French ship captain, a person from another Massachusetts town). We hypothesize, however, that this area was not actually vacant; we suspect that it contained the graves of many marginalized persons who either did not get a formal headstone or who had markers made out of perishable or non-durable materials.

Stone markers were costly, and engravings were priced by the letter. In the case of members of the African diaspora, it was common to decorate graves with wood, shells, and pottery (Garman 1994; Jamieson 1995; Krüger-Kahloula 1989). Archival research indicates that many more Black individuals, both enslaved and free, died in colonial and early republic Cambridge. What became of them in death? Can we find them and give them the same visibility afforded to white colonists? We hypothesize that the northwestern corner of the Old Burying Ground was the place where the enslaved Africans of Cambridge were put to rest. It is possible that Cicely and Jane were anomalies; they were afforded headstones (albeit undersized ones) while the others buried in this area were not. We suspect that with time, wooden markers might have decomposed or simple stones eventually been overtaken by the soil.

The project will include the following four components:

Archival research is necessary to establish population estimates of enslaved persons in Cambridge/Harvard at the time that the Old Burying Ground was in use, to give them their names back, and to establish their relationships with their enslavers and with each other. The names of many individuals of African descent have already been located in the vital records of Cambridge. Further genealogical research must be performed on enslavers and ties to Harvard need to be established. This component will be overseen by Dr. Lans, with the involvement of undergraduate or graduate students.

The project will develop a geospatial database of the Old Burying Ground, including the creation of a web map application accessible by students and the public. This component already exists in a rudimentary state; its expansion and improvement would be directed jointly by Dr. Lans and Prof. Ur with the assistance of undergraduate students and postdocs.

This database will include spatial and non-spatial aspects. For the former, the location of individual burials will be identified with high precision, particularly from GPR and drone aerial survey (see below). This positioning will allow us to ask important questions about status, some of which are already being answered: were enslaved persons buried near the families that owned them? Were they buried near each other, regardless of family? Was proximity to, e.g., the Square, the First Parish Church or Christ Church, etc., a factor in the burial of high- or low-status persons?

The non-spatial aspects of the database will also enhance our historical understanding. For example, can material elements of headstones (iconography, type of stone, height and width, language, length of inscription, etc.) be correlated with aspects of status? It may also be possible to link gravestones to individual carvers.

The database will also include photographs of the headstones as well as links to other published (e.g., William Thaddeus Harris’  Epitaphs from the Old Burying-Ground in Cambridge  (1845)), and unpublished (e.g., archival) materials. In the future, as the technology evolves, we envision links to 3D models of the headstones, an important preservation aspect of this project.

We intend to conduct a non-invasive, non-destructive geophysical survey of the northwestern quadrant of the Old Burying Ground using the technique of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to test for the presence of unmarked burials in the area. This component would be directed by Andrew Bair with involvement of undergraduate students.

Ground-penetrating radar is a near-surface geophysical technique that allows for discovery and mapping of buried objects and features not visible on the surface. A radar antenna resting on the ground surface emits pulses of radar energy that travel downwards through the subsurface. As radar pulses are transmitted through the various materials in the ground on their way to the buried features, their velocity will change, depending on the physical and chemical properties of the material through which they are traveling. Each abrupt velocity change generates a reflected wave, which travels back to the surface to be recorded. When tens of thousands of individual radar pulses are collected over a buried archaeological site, archaeologists can create remarkable three-dimensional maps of the buried material record. Ground-penetrating radar surveys allow for a relatively wide aerial coverage in a short period of time, with excellent subsurface resolution, and have proven effective at locating historic burials in a variety of geological contexts (Goodman and Piro 2013).

While it would be unfeasible to collect GPR data over the entirety of the Old Burying Ground, we would target this northwestern corner as well as one or more sample areas in the areas of densely preserved headstones in the eastern cemetery. The latter would serve as a control for the former, by giving us an understanding of how known burials appear in GPR data which could then be used to interpret the findings in the northwestern part of the cemetery.

The project will create high-resolution orthophotographs and terrain data of the Old Burying Ground, including 3D Virtual Reality (VR) models. These datasets would be generated from a series of overlapping aerial photos acquired by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV or drone) overflight. The flight would be undertaken autonomously using the DroneDeploy professional flight planning software. It would take approximately ten minutes to execute and would result in approximately 150 photographs.

This component would be supervised by Prof. Ur, who holds a license to fly small UAVs issued by the FAA, and who has used drones in his own research in Iraq, Peru, and the United States (see, e.g.,  Ur and Blossom 2019 ). This component could be undertaken with the further support of Andrew Bair and potentially other students of archaeology, undergraduate and graduate. The flight will be undertaken in morning hours, most likely on a weekend when foot and automotive traffic will be at a minimum, and it will conform to Federal regulations and City of Cambridge guidelines.

These aerial photos, once mosaicked together, will be the basis for a hyper-precise map of the cemetery, as well as a high-resolution topographic model. The latter will reveal subtle elevation differences that can be compared to the results of the subsurface GPR survey.

We anticipate that this project will result in a rich new dataset of Cambridge history in the 17 ^th  through 19 ^th  centuries AD, and, more importantly, new knowledge about Cambridge’s and Harvard’s people.

The historical dataset will take in several closely-connected forms:

• A historical database of the people of early Cambridge, with a particular emphasis on enslaved persons and the families that enslaved them, many of whom had close ties to Harvard College;
• A database of the monuments of the Old Burying Ground in Cambridge, including a wealth of information about each individual marker, and containing links to the historical database; 
• A spatial database of the Old Burying Ground, linking the historical persons database with the monuments database, and incorporating the drone survey photographs and 3D models and the subterranean results of the GPR survey;
• A publicly-accessible web-based interface that connects these three datasets to each other and to other historical sources, to enable historians and the public alike to ask and answer questions about Cambridge’s and Harvard’s past, including the history and legacy of slavery.

We anticipate that we will be able to document the likely final resting places of a substantial but long-overlooked group of people in Harvard’s Colonial community: enslaved and formerly enslaved persons of African origin. It has long been suspected that they were put to rest in the far northwestern corner of the Old Burying Ground (Charles Sullivan, personal communication). Using archaeological and archival research, this project should be able to confirm (or refute) this suspicion and make some real steps towards a more accurate history of the African and African-American people of Cambridge.

In many cases, we may be unable to connect individual enslaved persons to the Old Burying Ground, but we do expect that we will be able to draw closer connections between the institution of slavery and the white colonial persons buried there. Behind the names and dates on Colonial headstones are richer life histories that, in many cases, included the enslavement of others. It is important for anyone gazing upon the name on a headstone in the cemetery to have the full context of that person’s life; the digital histories emerging from this project will include a fuller set of legacies, including some that are painful but necessary to preserve.

The digital data from this project will become a part of the records Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative and of the Cambridge Historical Commission and, whenever possible, be made publicly available online to members of the Harvard community, the people of the City of Cambridge, and members of the public.

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Maskiell, N. S. 2020. " Cicely was young, Black and enslaved – her death during an epidemic in 1714 has lessons that resonate in today’s pandemic ." The Conversation, 2 Dec 2020.

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