A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Learning to Listen to the Voices of African American Descendant Communities in New York and Philadelphia in the Context of Compliance Archaeology, ca. 1990

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the early 1990s I was a project manager at a regionally well-known consulting firm of archaeologists, architects, and planners. Through my involvement in the excavation of Philadelphia’s 10th Street First African Baptist Church Cemetery and New York City’s African Burial Ground, I learned how to listen to the voices of descendant communities and subsequently argued for a research paradigm based on open, honest, and respectful relationships with descendant communities as partners in the research process. This paper will summarize and compare those experiences to highlight early successes and lessons hard-learned toward community-engaged archaeological praxis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37914.0