Black Bodies and the Making of Race in Antebellum America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

University and museum collections containing human remains belonging to members of the African diaspora have recently come under scrutiny and for valid reasons. The curation of the bodies of Black individuals continues to inflict violence and reinforces the notion that Black people are objects, not humans. During the winter of 2020/2021, it was revealed that the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, housed the remains of 15 individuals of African descent who were likely to have been alive during the time of slavery in the United States. This paper focuses on three Black Ancestors whose skulls traveled with Dr. Jeffries Wyman (1814–1874) when he left Hampden Sydney Medical College in Richmond, Virginia, to return to his alma mater, Harvard. Two skulls belong to men who were executed by the state of Virginia, and one belongs to an unnamed woman. Uncovering these Ancestors’ itineraries and determining where they might be laid to rest requires an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and bioarchaeologists. By combining archives of documents and bone, a case is made for the return of these individuals to a community that will mourn them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39401.0