Examining African-American Burial Choices through Jewelry at Freedman’s Cemetery, Dallas, Texas 1869-1907

Summary

Freedman’s Cemetery, in Dallas, Texas, was an inclusive African-American cemetery that was open from 1869 until it was forcibly closed in 1907. In the 1990s, the burials of 1157 individuals were excavated and documented as a result of the expansion of the adjacent North Central Expressway. This paper will look at the jewelry present in those burials, and how the presence, quantity and type of jewelry relates to socioeconomic factors. This information will be compared to other spatially and temporally similar mortuary populations, in an attempt to gain further insight into the lives of those who lived in this racially charged time. Aspects of consumerism, ideology, resistance, and health will be examined through an interpretation of the death event, and its corollary, how everyday people in Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction Dallas attempted to control or mitigate aspects of their daily life through their use of jewelry in the mortuary sphere.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Giving the Dead a New Life: Cemeteries and Bioarchaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-32,01