The Anson Street Ancestors

Site of the Anson Street Burying Ground

In 2013, a construction crew working in Charleston, South Carolina uncovered a cemetery. This turned out to hold the remains of 36 people, mostly of African ancestry. They were almost certainly slaves. This event inspired the creation of the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project, which has led a wide range of social, religious, and historical events and investigations. 

Among other things the Project staged an event in 2019 when a Yoruba priest came over and assigned African names to all the nameless people they refer to as Ancestors.

The Project decided to carry out DNA and elemental analysis of the remains to learn as much as possible about the Ancestors. This choice is why I am writing about the project, because the question of how to balance the desire to know with the desire to be respectful to the dead is huge in archaeology right now. American Indians have generally opted for respect and have blocked any scientified study of remains. However, many African American communities are opting for knowledge.

As I wrote here last year about the Catoctin Furnace burying ground, paleogenetics is providing a way for African Americans to pierce the veil that surrounds their ancestor's African origins and years of slavery. The US census never recorded the names of slaves, and many of the records that do list slaves by name, such as wills and probate inventories, use only their first names. (Until after 1820 or so many had no last names anyway.) After they achieved their freedom many black Americans tried to forget about their years of enslavement, so they passed on no stories about those years. The end of slavery also led to a vast geographic reshuffling, as millions of people moved away from the plantations and toward cities or just to somewhere else. It has therefore been impossible for most African Americans to trace their ancestry back past 1865.

Paleogenetics can often make that possible. The Charleston study has not identified any living descendants, but the Catoctin study found 2,000 people who might be related to the bodies in that cemetery. The genetics also provides a way to connect people in the Americas to the parts of Africa from which their ancestors came. One of the Anson Street Ancestors was almost certainly Fulani, an ethnic group from around Senegal, and may of the others could be traced to particular regions in Africa. One was majority African but nearly half Native American. The published material on the project seems to be deliberately vague about the dating of the cemetery, but from what I have seen it probably dates to the later 1700s.

Key to both the Catoctin and Anson Street studies has been for investigators to work closely with black communities and do only the studies they support. This may limit what can be done, but without people's support it would never be done at all. Paleogenetics is, I think, a wonderful tool that opens up vast new areas of knowledge. For its potential to be realized it must be done in a way that makes people feel empowered and enlightened rather than just used as research subjects.