African Burial Ground National Monument
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Transcript
In 1991, construction for a federal office building exposed human remains. Archaeologists eventually recognized part of a vast colonial burial ground used mainly by free and enslaved Africans from roughly the 1690s into the 1790s.
Historians estimate that as many as fifteen thousand people may have been buried across the larger cemetery. Archaeological work at the construction site recovered the remains of 419 individuals before they were reinterred in 2003.
The burial ground had disappeared from common memory as streets and buildings covered the landscape. Its rediscovery forced modern New York to confront how much of the Black colonial city had been physically and narratively buried.
The site also changes the geography of slavery. It is easy to imagine American slavery as primarily southern and rural. Here, in what became the center of Manhattan, enslaved Africans lived, worked, formed families, practiced cultural traditions and buried their dead.
The memorial’s power comes partly from interruption. A routine modern building project unexpectedly opened a passage into a city the financial district had largely forgotten.
When people say New York constantly reinvents itself, remember the warning embedded here: reinvention can also mean covering things over. Archaeology sometimes makes a city remember what development taught it to ignore.