Season 04 - Episode 03: Archaeological Identities - Part One
This episode is the first of a three-part series produced by Eleanor Neil, contributing editor at American Anthropologist and Anthropological Airwaves. From the African American Burial Ground in New York City to the memorialization of violence in Northern Ireland to professional archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, Eleanor asks archaeologists with different regional and methodological specialties to choose a single object or site, and, in their own words describe how this this site or artefact speaks to the interaction between archaeology and political or social identity across time and place.
Here, Dr. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche discusses the African American Burial Ground in lower Manhattan and the influence it has had on public engagement, perceptions of slavery in the northern United States, and the empowerment inherent in recognizing one’s own past in the archaeological record.
Dr. LaRoche is Associate Research Professor at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Her research on 18th and 19th-century free Black communities, institutions, and spaces combines law, history, oral history, archaeology, geography and material culture to define Black cultural landscapes, often navigating the convergences of public, private, political and social interests.
FURTHER READING:
LaRoche, Cheryl J. and Michael L. Blakey, ‘Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground’, Historical Archaeology, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1997), pp. 84-106.
Leone, Mark P. and Cheryl J. LaRoche, Jennifer J. Babiarz, ‘Archaeology of Black Americans in Recent Times’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 35 (2005), pp. 575-598.
TRANSCRIPT:
SPEAKERS
Eleanor Neil, Cheryl LaRoche, Anar Parikh
Anar Parikh 00:00
Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist, whose main offices are located on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Nacotchank, Anacostia, and Piscataway peoples. The Anacostia and Potomac rivers have long been places of trade and gathering for Indigenous peoples, and Washington DC is now home to diverse Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. American Anthropologist has published material throughout its history that have taken knowledge from Indigenous peoples for a scholarly audience and has not required its authors or editors to be good relations to Indigenous peoples and communities. Acknowledging territory is only one step in repairing these relationships. The Editorial Collective of the journal is committed to deep listening and engagement with Indigenous scholars, peoples, and communities to explore ways to be a better relation.
Anar Parikh 01:07
Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for another episode of Anthropological Airwaves – the official podcast of the journal, American Anthropologist. This is Season Four, Episode Three: Archaeological Identities - Part 1.
Anar Parikh 01:25
My name is Anar Parikh. Many of y’all might be familiar with my voice by now, but in case we haven’t had the chance to be acquainted yet, I’m the Associate Editor of the Podcast at American Anthropologist and the Executive Producer of Anthropological Airwaves.
Anar Parikh 01:41
I’m super excited to tell you about today’s episode, and what we have in store for Anthropological Airwaves listeners this summer! The next several episodes feature work by participants in American Anthropologist’s Contributing Editor program. This program is an editorial opportunity for graduate students in anthropology and related fields to work closely with the journal’s managing editor and with members of the editorial board to develop skills and build networks for their future careers inside and outside of academia. Over the course of a two-year term, contributing editors gain insight into the various facets of academic publishing, and work on projects that speak to their thematic and geographic interests.
Anar Parikh 02:26
Eleanor Neil, the contributing editor for Anthropological Airwaves, will tell you more about this episode in just a moment, but first let me introduce her and the project she’s been working on during her editorship at American Anthropologist. Eleanor is a PhD candidate in the Classics Department at Trinity College Dublin, where she is examining the role of community engagement in Cypriot archaeology. In conversation with her broader interests on how archaeology forms and informs contemporary social political dialogues, Eleanor has spent the past year developing a three-episode series titled, “Archaeological Identities.” From the African American Burial Ground in New York City to the memorialization of violence in Northern Ireland to professional archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, in each episode Eleanor asks archaeologists with different regional and methodological specialties to choose a single object or site, and, in their own words describe how this this site or artefact speaks to the interaction between archaeology and political or social identity across time and place. With each episode, Eleanor has also curated a list of additional readings for listeners who are interested in learning more. We’ll link to these readings in the show notes and include them on the episode transcript, which, as always, you can find on the Anthropological Airwaves page of the American Anthropologist website! And with that, I’ll turn it over to her…
Eleanor Neil 04:06
Welcome to archeological identities. My name is Eleanor Neil, I'm a contributing editor at American anthropologist and Anthro airwaves. In many ways, archaeology is as much about the time in which it is being undertaken, as it is about the past which it is exploring. In this three part podcast, archaeologists will be discussing the ways in which contemporary social and political discourse influence our understanding of archaeological phenomena, as well as the influence of the archaeological past on these contemporary discourses. Intrinsic to these discussions is the role archaeology plays in the creation, recreation, affirmation and solidification of personal and cultural identity.
Eleanor Neil 05:02
In this first episode, Dr. Cheryl LaRoche will discuss the African American Burial Ground in New York City. The burial ground became a public and political flashpoint in 1991, when hundreds of burials were uncovered during the construction of an office building for the US Federal Government, Dr. LaRoche worked on this site and spoke about her personal experiences and the lasting impact of the burial ground on New Yorkers, on Americans and on national discussions of race.
Cheryl LaRoche 05:38
So I'm Dr. Cheryl LaRoche, Cheryl Jannifer LaRoche. Right now, I am an associate professor in historic preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. But I'm also a consultant. And so I do a broad range of consulting across numerous sites, museums, cultural institutions, historic sites, and I've been working for the last six years or so for the National Park Service. And then I also spent a very intense amount of time helping the National Museum of African American History before it opened as their product historian for the cultural expressions exhibition on the top floor. So I cover a very broad spectrum of work. And so people will say to me, wait, wait, I thought you were an archaeologist? And I'll say yes. And then the next minute, I'm a material culture specialist. And I'll say yes, and so and the next minute, I'm a you know landscape specialist. And so all of these things I use to inform my understanding of the African American experience in America.
Cheryl LaRoche 06:54
I want to say, Oh, 25 years ago, I was the conservator on the African Burial Ground project in New York City. And that project, while I was the conservator, I was also observing. The underpinnings of what I learned at the African Burial Ground has served me for the rest of my professional life. The landscape itself, when we realized that these folks were buried in a ravine and had we had not used a topographic map to understand the lay of the land. I've written a book called Free Black Communities in the Underground Railroad: the Geography of Existence, many of the precepts in the Geography of Resistance that I lay out in that book is something that I learned on the African Burial Ground, how to use a topographic map, always have topography in mind. Understand that, when I'm looking for African Americans in the landscape, and I'm tending to look at places that are marginalized, they're always living in quote, unquote, the bottom or on a hill, there's always a word in the name of where we live, that indicates what's wrong with the land. I learned all of that from the landscape of the African Burial Ground. For multiple reasons, the lessons learned have served me well across my career.
Cheryl LaRoche 08:18
30 years ago, the African Burial Ground was discovered when the General Services Administration, United States government was breaking ground to build their skyscraper in lower Manhattan. And it generated a lot of controversy because the theory had been that the deep basements of the buildings that were standing on the lot would have destroyed any evidence. And that is not the case. And they encountered graves and the theory had been well, there're going to be fifty graves. That's this is what they had thought, because the map indicated that they were to alleys that had never been disturbed. And so that these burials were going to occur under these two alleyways. And New Yorkers had their mind sort of wrapped around fifty burials. But then it was 60. And then it was 70 and then it was 80, and then it was 90, then it was hundreds. And these hundreds of burials survived on the under the ground because they had been buried in the ravine. And the ravine had been filled. And then the building was built on top of the fill. So the discovery quote, unquote, the aha moment was A) a shock that there had been slavery in New York. B) people were unaccustomed in New York City in Manhattan in the early 90s to be talking about slavery. This is not South Carolina or Alabama. This is New York City. That was a revelation. And the people in New York were so horrified by the treatment that the cemetery was about to receive, that these human remains were about to be bulldozed into the sea was kind of the way New York wanted to handle it. All of those things. converged to bring together one of the most powerful archaeological probably experiences of the 20th century. And I was privileged to have been witness to all of that. And it changed my life. It shaped my career, it was deeply powerful. And it's spiritual.
Cheryl LaRoche 10:27
So that's the backdrop. And I can remember some of the most famous New York historians, being rather cavalier, oh, we always knew there was a cemetery. Well, you know, it's on some historic maps. But what I have discovered over time, is that what you know, and what you do with what you know, are two different things. And while these historians may have known that that cemetery was there, there was very little discussion about it. If you look, in the index of any book, written after about 1992, the African Burial Ground is always mentioned in New York history. If you look in the index before that date, it's almost never discussed. So it was a deep revelation for New Yorkers. And it was a moment of reckoning around slavery for New York and slavery in the North. The memorial that's there now is a touchstone, almost every site that I work on, that's historic, archaeological, it doesn't really matter the origins of the site, there's usually a deep cultural component. And I think when it's African American history, we don't separate the name of our museum is African American History and Culture. And those two things are going hand in hand at all times. And so as a cultural touchstone, the monuments, the exterior interpretation, the demarcation of the place, and the space is very important. When they were reburying the human remains, they were put in coffins that were hand carved and sent from Ghana and put in the ground, another cultural connection. And then you go inside into the building, which is still a federal building. It's not a museum, it's a federal space, there is an interpretive center there. Because of the importance of what happened on that space. And because it's still functioning as a burial ground, there is still probably a few hundred graves back in the ground, these coffins were reinterred on the site. And so it's still a functioning cemetery in that way. And so I think that the, the meaning of it, it always comes back as a place of commemoration, it's a central gathering place for people. And when I'm in Manhattan, I still go by and still pay homage. You know, from a spiritual perspective, I gained a relationship with the ancestors, which were a topic of conversation very much and thematic cornerstone of the burial ground, all of those things coalesce to make this one of the major sites ever.
Cheryl LaRoche 13:05
Tell you a story, I had developed a lecture during that time, mapping the burial grounds over the ages, because it went through different iterations. And then the Collect Pond was there and was still a pond and then they closed it up. And but you can always tell where it is because it's a triangular wedge of land in front of City Hall that's never been touched from the earliest days of Dutch occupancy. And so I always bring you down to the triangle and move you north and people can always find the burial ground after I've given that lecture. But I went in, I was giving it for the New York Historical Society. And someone said to me, you know, remember, I'm a conservator. And I'm working through all of this stuff in real time. Someone says to me, Oh, the head of the map division of the New York Historical Society is here for your talk. And every date, every date that I had, for every map, sprouted wings, I watched it and flew out of my head.
Cheryl LaRoche 14:18
The burial ground broke open, many different modern aspects of archaeology that we see today. In the past, you always conducted archaeology behind a screen, nobody saw you as it was closed off it. It looked like any other construction site in Manhattan. It was such a public clamor that they had to open it up, give tours, we had to let people in. And usually there you know, we cite a number of dangers, because archaeological sites can be quite dangerous. So all these reasons you didn't have steel toed boots, whatever it was, and that had to change in order for the audience that was clamoring to understand it, but the polarizing and political aspects of that site were such that there were a lot of competing interests, there was the City of New York, and then federal government who wanted to get this thing done, you know, construction timelines come with fees and penalties when you do not meet them. And so any disruption is a cause for politicians to be concerned, for us, for the money people be concerned. And the New York Public, the Brooklyn, Brooklynites, in particular, were absolutely steadfast in their dedication to the project. Because, again, it was such a shock to the system, it made headline news, it made the front page, people were demonstrating and marching, the controversy did not go away. And there was also controversy over what to do with it remains do we extract the DNA that we get ancient DNA? Do we study these things scientifically? Do we let them rest and not bother them at all? Do we take them out of the city of New York is New York, gonna lose its own cultural patrimony to let it go to Howard and be studied there. So there were all these components. But you know, politics and race, in specifically because this was the unspoken and yet very overt occurrence that was happening is with us this very moment, you know, we're listening to it not over archaeology, but over education. And so one of the things that the burial ground did, was to bring the field of archaeology to the awareness and consciousness of black Americans. Before then, you know, people were digging up Greece, or Rome or London, wherever, but not New York City and not around Black history. So it gave the ordinary citizen and African Americans because it was a coalition of Black and white, it gave them a mandate to save this site. Because the site meant so much on so many different levels, whether it was political, whether it was historical, or whether it was archaeological, or cultural, or the material culture, because I've worked on all the artifacts, people would come in to the lab and bless my hands. Because my hands had touched the artifacts, and the artifacts had touched the ancestors.
Cheryl LaRoche 17:28
It was a profound experience. It's interesting, because I haven't come back to talk about it like this. And move forward. I'm always working, I've got the next project. But to come back and revisit this in this way, it's an interesting thing to engage with. We were so busy battling to save the site, that these larger questions were there, but could not be engaged with in the same amount of intensity, because we were trying to save the site. There's now new legislation coming to the fore. One of the huge problems is that the burial site of the enslaved African Americans are unmarked, they're, you know, down in Louisiana, they're on some very expensive and rich land, and people know where these cemeteries are. So this whole aspect of Black history is being washed away. There's a fight in my hometown of Bethesda, Maryland, over the cemetery, so that the cemetery as a bounded space of cultural, religious, and political expression. Because the reason why people are in those spaces is because of policies and the landscape. It's because of slavery. It's because of all of these reasons that the cemetery has not been interpreted on the multi layers that it should and could be, but largely, they're being destroyed. Places where cemeteries usually are in the landscape, are on undesirable land as well. And so that's why you always climbing the hill up to these historic cemeteries, you're going down a hill because the land was farmable, or buildable, you're not going to put a cemetery there. Now this land ends up being you know, a precipice for a beautiful view, or it ends up being desirable for other reasons where it was undesirable in the past, it's now highly desirable in the present.
Cheryl LaRoche 19:34
So the politics around cemeteries, their usage, their interpretation is something that that we could we could delve into much more deeply and talk about the various aspects of understanding that could be derived from a multidisciplinary approach to understanding these spaces. And you know, when it goes back to mapping one of the things, cemeteries of the enslaved, they're often not marked, the burial ground was marked and the British, God bless them, they marked everything the African Burial Ground was clearly marked on the maps by the British as well. But we are hampered by this lack of policy, this lack of consistency. And many of the cemeteries in question are on private land, when I was at the Hampton plantation, this cemetery is associated, the vault cemetery for the family is found, we think the highway 695 is running over a cemetery for African Americans. And that's the other thing going this is useless land, we don't care that there's a slave cemetery on it, let's just put a highway through it, which is you know. I have joked often, that I'm going to take people around on the highway tour, because so much of African American History is underneath 95. And many of my colleagues, you know, work in highway departments DOT they know they're gonna encounter sensitive material that, you know, that's, you know, they really want to dig up and get out, keep going, I want to give a lecture for HUD, Housing and Urban Development, I thought this woman was probably going to lose her job, because I leaned out from the podium and said, "Do you guys get in the back room, map out every African American resource and then decide to put a highway through it?" And it was just like gasps, and I thought, Oh, her job is done. But I said it in that manner. But it is true. When you look at the level of destruction that has taken place, from highways, from urban renewal, from redevelopment. I just finished a long study on Reconstruction and all of these very early Black communities that started right around the Civil War, were wiped out, for one reason or another, so that it's very hard from a landscape and a mapping perspective, in particular, to give a thorough history of African Americans in the land. It's not an easy thing to do.
Cheryl LaRoche 22:18
I'm just gonna keep my remarks to African Americans. So I think the need for archaeology is really there, in part, because we have not paid attention to the built environment for African Americans, we have not curated spaces that should have been curated, we have allowed things to crumble, whether those are slave quarters or communities. And so that archaeology is the last gasp of reclamation. And so no matter what I may think about it as a discipline or as a practice, I will confine my remarks to using it as a tool of discovery to enhance Black history. Look, I'm a Black woman in America, I have to suspend a lot of stuff. So I might have to suspend my understanding of the colonialist nature of some of the work that I do, because I am achieving something else. And you know, I am going to have to use the Master's tools to get at that. But having said that, one of the things that I see, archaeology is expensive. You need trained fieldworkers who understand what they're doing. You need expensive equipment, oftentimes, these are things that are not available. And so even when there is a clamor for archaeology on the site that desperately is in need of it, we're not always guaranteed to actually be able to avail ourselves to the field into the benefits of it. So no matter what one must say, we have to have a lot of equipment to do this work and a lot of money. And either you're gonna get an academic institution. And what makes archaeology elitist is a decision like this is important, I will dig it up, this is not important, I will not or I do not have the resources or grad students because you know, gradstudents are a great boon to archaeology. Some of the most important sites that get excavated, are, you know, have the archaeologists basically as a grad student, basically as a PI, but they're just PhD project and as I always say, to people, you know, you're luckiest thing you can do is get a PhD student interested in your your site, because then they will come in and help you excavate. Barring that, these things are going to completely disappear or be completely destroyed. You know, whatever subway line is going in next. There is a complicated answer to how I view archaeology as a practice. So I want to set separate it out archaeology as a practice and archaeology as a tool, and I am interested in archaeology as a tool. And I want to say one more thing about history, Black history, in particular, but history in general. I had thought so long and hard about archaeology and its enhancement of history, because I realized that once one has a historical understanding of self, that we take up more space in the world, we can think back, we can think forward, we can think expansively about ourselves, and the relationships we have from a historical perspective. When you are told that you have no history, it's like you have no foundation, you have no past, you have no being. And so there has been a concerted effort, whether it's in the ground, whether it's the built environment, whether it's Black history, or Black culture, the burning of Black churches, for example. These are practices moves designed to keep people small, and disempowered. And to the extent that archaeology brings forward an expansiveness to this historical awareness of self, I think it's a very important undertaking.
Eleanor Neil 26:20
Thank you, Dr. The Roche. I'm Eleanor Neil. And this has been archaeological identities.
Anar Parikh 26:38
Thanks for listening to another episode of Anthropological Airwaves. Many thanks to Dr. Cheryl LaRoche for her generous reflections on her career and on her work at the African American Burial Ground in New York City. The episode was written, edited, and produced by Eleanor Neil with additional production support from Anar Parikh—the Executive Producer of Anthropological Airwaves and Associate Editor of the Podcast at American Anthropologist. The intro and outro music you hear is titled “Waiting” by Crowander. The transition track features “Spirit Blossom” by Roman Belov. Checkout the show notes, as well as the episode transcript for further reading.
Anar Parikh 27:17
As always, a closed caption version of all of Anthropological Airwaves episodes, including this one, will be available on our YouTube channel and a full transcription on the episode page on the American Anthropologist website. Links to both are included in the show notes. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Anthropological Airwaves wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, don’t forget to rate and review us while you’re there. A five-star review in particular can really help other listeners find the show! We would also love to hear from you in general. If you have feedback, recommendations, or thoughts on recent episodes, send an email to amanthpodcast@gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on our Facebook page or on Twitter with the handle @AnthroAirwaves. Find links to all of our contact information in the show notes and on the Anthropological Airwaves section of the American Anthropologist website. Take it easy! We’ll be back next month with the next installment of “Archaeological Identities.”