When someone tells you a cemetery had to be relocated before they built your house, don’t bank on it:
[Dr. Patricia] Richards is the associate director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Cultural Resource Management (UWM-CRM) program, the contractual branch of the university’s Department of Anthropology, which helps clients maintain compliance with the state’s archeological standards and provides interpretation services. And she’s seen plenty of “relocated” cemeteries resurface before. “In my career as an urban archeologist, if I had a dollar for every time remains were supposed to be moved and they weren’t,” she says, her voice trailing off meaningfully. Often, only headstones were relocated; following through with transferring the bodies themselves was dependent on whether there was family in the area to “steward the remains.” If an immigrant had come to America alone, or if his or her family had moved out of the area or died themselves, chances were no one would make sure gravesites were tended.
Or, when necessary, dug up and moved.
In this case, the director of the Guest House was hopeful that the graves had been relocated, since she knew late-19th century housing had stood on the lot. In fact, Richards points out where the foundation of a rather shallow basement had to be removed in advance of her team’s excavation. But, she says, when they lifted it out, clear stains from the disintegrating wood coffins marked the bottom of the cement – the 19th century homebuilders must’ve known exactly what they were building on top of.
From the Field Notes blog at Discover.com.
Reading through the entry, it strikes me that archaeologists may be even more detail-oriented than software engineers:
In addition to the remains themselves, the dirt removed from each grave is saved to be sifted or floated to search for small bones or other items; buckets of soil are constantly being ferried back and forth from the graves as Richards and Jones stand and talk with me. In particular, floating the dirt from the pelvic region can uncover fetal bones, if the deceased was a pregnant woman, which can help establish sex and age range. Dirt from the abdomen and pelvic area will also be sent to a researcher for parasitological analysis; information about what was in these earlier settlers’ guts can yield information about migration, cultural changes, and dietary habits.
And this also caught my eye.
One thing the analysis likely won’t yield: Identification of the remains. The Second Ward Cemetery is also referred to as the “German Protestant Cemetery” in 19th-century newspapers, but it was not affiliated with any one parish or congregation. The mortgage on the land was held by early Milwaukee businessman and Pomeranian immigrant John Grunhagen and likely got its name as a nod to the ethnicity of the surrounding neighborhood. Because of the lack of parish affiliation, there are no known burial records, and the lack of records makes identification extremely unlikely.
I’ve read archaeology magazines for years, so I was aware of this activity, but keeping in mind there’s 8 billion of us on this globe now, somehow I just can’t get excited about identifying their remains, by which I mean putting names to the remains. I can get excited at amassing analyses and coming to statistical conclusions about these people, such as this:
Richards and Jones note the individuals’ dental health as well. Adults, they say, had overwhelmingly good teeth. The juveniles, however… “Massive cavities,” Jones says.
That’s an initial impression, but you take my point – the statistics tell us far more about what’s happening in the environment than whether this woman was Joan or Joanne. Certainly some most folks find this important. But as someone who’s in favor of green burial (I often tell my wife to just toss me in a ditch so I may rejoin the ecological system immediately), I guess I’m a little baffled.
