Back in 1979, archaeologists working for the state found and excavated 35 burials in the way of a road-straightening project near the furnace. This appears to be the cemetery for the enslaved people who worked at the furnace. The bones have been in the Smithsonian ever since, and now a very interesting genetic study of the remains has been published in Science. (NY Times, NPR, Science) The study traced the gradual blending of African and European genes into an African American populations, that is, early people were recognizably all African or half or one quarter European, but by the Civil War the amount of European ancestry was fairly uniform. The thing that is getting a lot of attention now is that the researchers compared the DNA from the cemetery to profiles posted at 23andMe – there is a box you can check on your 23andMe form that makes your profile available to researchers – and identified more than 2,000 people who seem closely related to the Catoctin Furnace worker families. Many of them may be descendants. One reason to take this data seriously is that in our time these genes are still concentrated in Maryland, rather than randomly distributed. This study opens up a wonderful new avenue for African Americans to trace their families back into the historical void of slavery, where records almost always identify people by their first names only.
To me the most important thing about this study is its potential to break down the wall of suspicion that surrounds paleogenetics. Many, many groups around the world refuse to allow their ancestors's bones to be tested, and these days excavated human bones are almost always immediately reburied. The keeping of bones in scientific laboratories is very widely seen as a colonialist crime, and these repositories have become one of the biggest issues between archaeologists and others. But archaeologists don't keep the bones because they are evil, but because they are curious. We want to learn about the past. The Catoctin study shows the incredible potential of paleogenetics to open up new windows into the past, especially for groups whose past is not well documented. As Henry Louis Gates (one of the authors of the study) put it, “The history of Black people was intended to be a dark, unlit cave,” but with these new techniques, “you’re bringing light into the cave.”
If the bones from the Catoctin cemetery had been reburied, that cave would still be dark.
The thing about studying the past, though, is that you don't always find what you want. The Melungeons, for example, spent 200 years claiming that they were anything but mulatto –Turkish, North African, Native American, etc. – but genetics revealed that that they are mainly what their hostile neighbors said they were, a mix of white and black with a small amount of Native American. There are rumors that the leaders of some Native American groups in the eastern US have been tested and found that they have no or very little Native ancestry.
One source of conflict between archaeologists and Native Americans concerns continuity in place. Native groups trying to hold onto their homes want to claim very long residence, preferably several thousand years, but archaeologists see a whole lot of movement and mixing in Native groups, especially during the catastrophe of European invasion and conquest.
Science is like that. Sometimes it confirms old stories, but often it does not. Sometimes it supports the claims of Native groups to have long lived in some particular spot, and sometimes it shows something very different.
So, do you want to know, or not? Millions of African Americans do want to know, and so are very excited by the potential of paleogenetics to connect them to their enslaved ancestors and perhaps even back to the parts of Africa from which they were kidnapped and sold. And wherever people really do want to know, they will find scientists who want to work with them.
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