Applying Geophysical Prospection to Interpret Historical Burial Practices at Two Cemeteries on St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean

Summary

This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This research examines the relationship between the Old Church Cemetery and the Jewish Cemetery on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. These cemeteries are located near each other, yet the people buried in them had different religious ideologies and social positions. Utilizing ground-penetrating radar and gradiometry, I searched for unmarked burials for a more accurate representation of the cemeteries while they were in use to analyze the cultural relationship between the Dutch Reformed and the Jewish community in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In ArcGIS, possible grave anomalies were identified, and the dimensions of extant and possible burials measured. This narrowed down what anomalies could be a burial based on the dimensions of the anomaly. Anomalies that persist throughout the GPR grids or match historical maps were identified as burials. The data suggest potential unmarked burials in the Old Church Cemetery and the Jewish Cemetery. The marked Jewish burials orient northwest to southeast and the marked Dutch Reformed burials orient east to west. Differences in dimensions of extant burials were detected by *t-test. These results suggest evidence of different cultural traditions and will be researched further.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30909