Investigating Historic Violence with Community Archaeology: Preliminary Work in the Investigation of the Thibodaux Massacre

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Public Archaeology and CRM in Louisiana: Making Historical Archaeology Matter", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This presentation reports on preliminary investigations of the Thibodaux Massacre of 1887, a mass casualty event perpetuated by White planters and property owners on striking Black laborers and community members in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Employing methodologies from historic archaeology and forensic anthropology, this investigation aims to locate and delineate a purported mass grave associated with a confrontation that began with striking sugarcane laborers and ended in racist violence. Community folk histories focus on a landscape transformed by residential and commercial construction and buried by a twentieth-century landfill. Available scholarship suggests the violence was aimed at Black community members indiscriminately and that most deaths resulted from gunshot wounds. Early aspects of the investigation detailed here include community engagement initiatives, the collection and assessment of community oral histories, and archival research intended to guide later geophysical assessments in areas with a high probability of containing human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Public Archaeology and CRM in Louisiana: Making Historical Archaeology Matter

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow