Collaborative Approaches to Restoring Agency for Residents of the Sonoma Developmental Center’s “Home Cemetery”

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Sonoma Developmental Center served thousands of residents who would today be described as disabled, mentally ill, or deviating from social norms. Many of the ~2000 residents buried in its cemetery from 1892-1960 were placed in the SDC as children. Their gravemarkers featured only their initials and registration number, and even these were removed soon after the cemetery went out of use. Since the SDC’s closure in 2018, community members sought to visibly memorialize the cemetery and its residents. Their efforts, which included fundraising and consensus building among state agencies and politicians, culminated in the recent dedication of a large memorial. Since 2022, Sonoma State University has worked with these stakeholders to learn more about SDC residents’ lives and deaths through archival research and digital technologies, and to document the cemetery through non-invasive archaeological methods amidst impending land transfer to California State Parks and redevelopment by private entities. This presentation demonstrates how, by uniting the University’s resources and expertise with the passion and knowledge of local communities, we are safeguarding the cemetery as a cultural resource. Our research centers the stories of the people buried there in an attempt to restore some of the agency that institutionalization stripped from them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50829