Disturbed Rest: The Destruction and Commemoration of An African-American Cemetery in Haughton, LA—A Collaboration of Archaeology, Ethnology, Law Enforcement, and Community

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2010, reports surfaced of an African-American cemetery in the northwest Louisiana hamlet of Haughton having been destroyed by a white male seeking squatters’ rights on the property. Among the reported rumors were that a church and its cemetery had been bulldozed and that human remains had been dug up. Subsequent investigation of these reports by the Louisiana Department of Justice bore out the truth of many of the rumors: The remnants of a church and tombstones were bulldozed; however, the human remains were intact. In the natural gas boom of the late 2000s known as the Haynesville Shale gas play, a white male took a bulldozer to a largely abandoned African-American cemetery in order to stake a claim to potentially valuable mineral producing property. In cooperation with local police, the usurper was ejected from the property. The erasure of the visible cultural landscape (the church and tombstones) is a form of violence that is psychologically devastating to the community. This presentation reviews the difficulties involved in enforcing cemetery protection laws and how archaeology, ethnology, legal recourse, and community efforts were used to eke out a modicum of a memorial to their ancestors in the wake of devastating landscape violence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35865.0