Panorama photo of Burial Hill

Geophysics will be part of the field school at Plymouth.  We plan to do some GPR and conductivity at Burial Hill during the first weeks of the field season.  Brian Damiata and I will be running the survey for the first few weeks of the field school.  You can see some of Brian’s work at Sylmar, Santa Monica, and Crows Landing.  Not only will students learn about collecting the data, but they will also learn how to analyze it with GPR Slice software.

It is not too late to register

Plymoutn in 1846 showing location of archaeological field school.

The Archaeological Field School in Plymouth, Massachusetts is collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston. This summer’s work will help launch “Project 400: The Plymouth Colony Archaeological Survey,” a broad project of site survey and excavation leading up the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Colony in 2020.  Much of the archaeological work will take place along Spring Ln near the Jenney Mill

You can learn more at http://www.umb.edu/academics/caps/summer_programs/field_study/archaeological_plymouth

UMass Boston grad student Allison Conner (left) obtains GPS points while Dr. John Steinberg places flags to mark where the GPR survey would be conducted. Mt. Gilead AME Church is in the background.

Founded sometime in the 1830s, Mount Gilead sits on a wooded ridge in Buckingham, Pennsylvania. At the time of its founding, the church was located in an area surrounded by farms mostly owned by white Quakers. Little has been documented about this church’s history and its relationship with the surrounding areas, although the church leadership believes that there were once one hundred families who lived on the ridge line and comprised the community of the church.

The people buried in the church cemetery include freeborn African-Americans, individuals who escaped or were emancipated from slavery, as well as some people without African descent who have been part of the mountain community as it’s changed over the past century. Local legends and local histories tie this church even more strongly to the Underground Railroad (Blockson 1975:13), including to the figure of Benjamin “Big Ben” Jones, whose dramatic recapture by Southern slave hunters was recently fictionalized in an independent film.

UMass Boston graduate students Nadia Kline (left) and Allison Conner prepare the cemetery for the survey on an unseasonably cold morning.

In terms of the research for my master’s thesis, I am interested in seeing whether the cemetery was in use before the church actually owned the property, potentially suggesting the surreptitious use of this land by people of the Underground Railroad or suggesting types of aid which Quakers in this area may have provided to the people of the church.

In order to do this, we needed to map the locations of extant gravestones as well as use shallow geophysics to see whether all graves in the cemetery are marked. Thanks to a research grant from the Graduate Student Assembly at UMass Boston, I was able to bring several professors (Drs. John Steinberg and John Schoenfelder) as well as two of my fellow graduate students to the site to survey the whole area of the cemetery both above ground and by using ground-penetrating radar (GPR).

John Steinberg pulls the GPR antenna along the ground while Nadia Kline watches the read-out on its monitor.

GPR “sees” graves by sending and receiving pulses of electromagnetic energy into the soil and recording the reflections of that energy off of changes in the ground structure as well as reflections from buried objects.  You can see an example from the Sylvester Manor project for an idea of what these read-outs look like or read a slightly more detailed description of the technology in another Fiske Center blog post.  Unfortunately, GPR has no way to determine the actual age of anything it sees, but by studying the results in combination with archival documents, I’m hoping to be able to be able to answer these and other questions.

The results of this work are still forthcoming, but should help bring to light more about this church’s history, growth, and persistence in the area.  It should also help with ongoing preservation efforts at the church and cemetery.

Reference

Blockson, Charles L.
1975    Pennsylvania’s Black History. Louise B. Stone, editor. Portfolio Associates, Philadelphia, PA.

Dennis Piechota, Heather Trigg, & Steve Mrozowski in Washington Square in front of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at NYU. The Sylvester Manor exhibit, described in the article, is in the red building.

There is a nice article on Sylvester Manor in the Garden section of the New York Times

Eben Fiske Osby at the opening of the special preview of “Sylvester Manor: Land, Food and Power on a New York Plantation”

Steve Mrozowski, as well as other folks from the Fiske Center attended a special preview of the exhibition “Sylvester Manor: Land, Food and Power on a New York Plantation” on Tuesday night.  Eben Fiske Osby opened the event with a graceful speech

Stephen Mrozowski points to a picture of Alice Fiske at the NYU exhibit with bones excavated from Sylvester Manor.

If you are in New York you can see some wonderful artifacts excavated by UMass Boston Field Schools in the Bobst Library Gallery on Washington Square, at NYU.  They also have on display some wonderful documents that were in the vault.  These documents are now part of the NYU collection.

You can read Stephen Mrozowski’s 2007 dedication to Alice Fiske from Northeast Historical Archaeology: Vol. 36: Iss. 1 at:   http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=neha

Steve Mrozowski (right, foreground) and John Steinberg take the GPR unit on a test run before beginning a full survey. John Schoenfelder (background) maps the area.

The original multi-year research project at Sylvester Manor was concerned with understanding the interrelationships of the various groups of people who interacted at the site in the 1600s and 1700s, including Anglo-Dutch colonists, enslaved Africans, and Native American laborers. These peoples’ presence was known from historic documents, although not all of them left their own writings. What is clear from this and the archaeological findings are that the interactions among all of these people changed them and their cultures in profound ways. However, it is often difficult to tease out these specific influences from the artifacts alone (Mrozowski et al. 2007:2-8).

One particular location on the manor’s grounds where these kinds of changes may be more visible is the area said to be the manor’s slave cemetery. Since the late 19th century, a memorial has stood commemorating the “Burial Ground for the Colored People of Sylvester Manor.” This memorial and local lore attest to the idea that this place was where the plantation’s slaves were being buried, as early as the 1600s. Although a fence marks off its location from the surrounding low hills, and some small rocks dot the area like grave markers, it is not possible to confirm or deny the story just by looking at the ground’s surface. Out of respect for the dead and respect for any living descendants, as well as in accordance with various laws and good archaeological practice, Fiske Center researchers planned no excavations of the cemetery grounds to try to answer this question.

GPR Slice image of the study areas, about 60 centimeters below the ground surface. The red box marks the location of the fence. The smaller area to the right is the control area.

In order to see if the area holds any burials, the team (including Drs. Steve Mrozowski, John Steinberg, and John Schoenfelder, as well as three UMass Boston graduate students) opted to use a shallow geophysical technique called ground-penetrating radar (GPR). GPR works by sending out regular pulses of electromagnetic energy into the ground at a similar frequency to cell phone transmissions. These waves bounce off of different kinds of surfaces underground, such as geological layers, rocks, or buried human-made features like foundations and graves. The GPR unit receives the reflected waves and produces a radargram, which is read for particular kinds of anomalies. Since these readings are taken in closely-spaced straight lines across the study area, the radargrams produced are then “sliced” so that it’s possible to see what the ground looks like at various depths across the whole area at once. These slices effectively “excavate” the ground at different depths and allow researchers to see the kinds of things that may be found at those depths. (See John Steinberg’s illustration of this, including what archaeologists look for in the radargrams.)

Since other kinds of anomalies, such as tree roots, can sometimes appear like graves, we also collected data in a control area–a second area outside of the fenced cemetery but nearby and still within the same type of natural setting. Even in the field, it was clear that the areas looked very different in terms of the GPR. The types of anomalies seen in the fenced area were not being found outside of it, potentially proving that the cemetery, is, in fact, where it’s said to be.

UMass Boston graduate students Nadia Kline (left) and Allison Conner process GPR data on a day when fieldwork was rained out.

More analysis needs to be conducted in order to draw any definitive conclusions about the data, but the preliminary results suggest the presence of graves within the area known as a burial ground. It is highly unlikely that the GPR alone would be able to show whether the burials are of enslaved persons, but positive geophysical results lend credence to the stories told about this place.

This study marked the first archaeological field research conducted at Sylvester Manor in about five years, and certainly proves that there is always more that places like this can teach us. In this case, finding probable graves within the cemetery reminds us not to dismiss oral histories, but to explore how they bear out under further scrutiny.

Reference

Mrozowski, Stephen A., Katherine Howlett Hayes, and Anne P. Hancock
2007           The Archaeology of Sylvester Manor. Northeast Historical Archaeology 36: 1-15.

Alice Fiske and Stephen Mrozowski

There is a short article in the East Hampton Star about our work at Sylvester Manor and the upcoming exhibition opening at NYU. For some reason the reporter got the impression that there was an NYU group doing work as well.  All the archaeological work at Sylvester Manor during March 2013 was done by The Fiske Center at UMass Boston, including the GPR.  You can see some of the results in a previous post.  NYU does hold the very interesting archives from Sylvester Manor.

In 2000 Alice Fiske and UMass Boston archaeological field school students.

New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library presents an opening reception for the exhibition “Sylvester Manor: Land, Food and Power on a New York Plantation,” curated by Jennifer Anderson, PhD., on Wednesday, April 10, 2013 from 6:00-9:00 p.m. in the Mamdouha Bobst Gallery, main floor, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South.

You can learn more at the NYU web page as well as the Sylvester Manor web page.  Most of the Fiske Center Staff will be there.