More evidence has emerged that humans have been altering the environment for much longer than the current climate crisis. A new study published in Science Advances Wednesday found evidence that humans used fire to change the landscape around Lake Malawi in Africa as early as 92,000 years ago.
Archaeologists made their discoveries in the Karonga District in Northern Malawi.
“This is essentially what we call the earliest anthropogenic landscape on Earth,” study co-author and University of Oslo archaeology professor David Wright said in a press release.
The finding was the result of a collaboration between scientists who study ancient ecosystems and scientists who study ancient humans, Scientific American explained.
In 2018, Pennsylvania State University paleoecologist and study coauthor Sarah Ivory published a study on climate conditions around Lake Malawi over the past 636,000 years.
Pollen, fossil, and sediment records showed that forests would grow around the lake during wet periods and disappear during dry periods. This remained unchanged until around 86,000 years ago.
At this point, the forest returned briefly during the wet period, only to suddenly fade and shift into grassland along with some fire-resistant tree species.
Yale University paleoanthropologist Jessica Thompson was also working around Lake Malawi. She told Ivory about a spike in human artefacts around 92,000 years ago, suggesting that humans had moved to the area.
Investigating further, the researchers found increasing evidence of charcoal deposits in cores drilled from the lake bed following human arrival. Could humans have burned down the forests and permanently altered the vegetation?
“Hunter-gatherers who go after hooved mammals can find it hard to hunt prey when it’s in a closed tree environment. So we suspect the humans who arrived in the Karonga district [around Lake Malawi] started burning down the forest to open the landscape for hunting,” Wright explained in the University of Oslo release. “It may also have provided new foods like starchy tubers that like to grow in open areas.”
Professor David Wright has discovered that early humans altered the landscape and ecology in Northern Malawi using fire.
There are other possible explanations, Thompson acknowledged in a Yale University press release. It is possible that the fires were not lit intentionally, but were started accidentally. The charcoal could just come from smaller fires lit for cooking or warmth.
But, either way, it shows that humans have long had a transformative impact on their environments.
“One way or another, it’s caused by human activity,” Thompson told Yale. “It shows early people, over a long period of time, took control over their environment rather than being controlled by it. They changed entire landscapes, and for better or for worse that relationship with our environments continues today.”
Though it dates from the earliest point, the study is not the first to present data that hunter-gatherers altered landscapes with controlled burns. Other evidence has emerged from 50,000 years ago in Borneo, 45,000 years ago in New Guinea and 40,000 years ago in Australia, Scientific American pointed out.
For Wright, this may set back the date for the Anthropocene — the term for when human presence and activity altered the geologic record. On local levels, Wright says, this process began tens of thousands of years ago.
“Wherever humans are, we transform landscapes because of our natural vulnerabilities as a species,” Wright told the University of Oslo. “We cannot manage landscapes without changing them.”
Israeli archaeologists find Roman, medieval treasures in ancient shipwrecks off Mediterranean coast
Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the remnants of two shipwrecks off the Mediterranean coast, replete with a sunken trove of hundreds of Roman and medieval silver coins.
A gold ring with a green gemstone engraved with the figure of the good shepherd was discovered submerged at Caesarea harbour.
The finds made near the ancient city of Caesarea were dated to the Roman and Mamluk periods, about 1,700 and 600 years ago, archaeologists said.
They include hundreds of Roman silver and bronze coins dating to the mid-third century, as well as more than 500 silver coins from the middle ages, found amid the sediment.
An aerial view of the Caesarea port.
They were found during an underwater survey conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority’s marine archaeology unit in the past two months, said Jacob Sharvit, the head of the unit, on Wednesday.
Among the other artefacts recovered from the site near the ancient city of Caesarea were figurines, bells, ceramics, and metal artefacts that once belonged to the ships, such as nails and a shattered iron anchor.
The underwater discovery of a gemstone submerged at Caesarea harbour.
The IAA underscored the discovery of a Roman gold ring, its green gemstone carved with the figure of a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders.
Robert Cole, the head of the authority’s coin department, called the item “exceptional.”
The IAA uncovered the ancient treasures from the wrecks of two ships.
“On the gemstone is engraved an image of the ‘good shepherd’, which is really one of the earliest symbols of Christianity,” he said.
Sharvit said that the Roman ship was believed to have originally hailed from Italy, based on the style of some of the artefacts. He said it was still unclear whether any remnants of the wooden ships remained intact beneath the sands.
Spanish researchers claim to have found lost ancient building dedicated to Hercules
The legendary temple of Hercules Gaditanus, who was known as Melqart in Phoenician times, was a key pilgrimage site in ancient times.
According to classical records, the temple witnessed the passage of historical figures such as Julius Caesar and the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal, and dated at least as far back as the ninth century BC.
But thousands of years later, its location remains a mystery, and finding the temple has become something of a holy grail for historians and archeologists, who have been searching for it for centuries.
Aerial view of the temple’s possible location.
Now there is a possible answer to this great mystery. Ricardo Belizón, a Ph.D. student at Seville University in southern Spain, has come up with a new hypothesis, which is backed by scientists from his university and the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH).
Thanks to free software and digital terrain modeling, Belizón has identified traces of a monumental building in the Caño de Sancti Petri, a shallow channel in the Bay of Cádiz, between the towns of Chiclana de Frontera and San Fernando, in the southern region of Andalusia.
The hypothetical view that the archaeologist García y Bellido made of the Hercules temple, in 1968, based on the one in Jerusalem.
The temple of Hercules Gaditanus is mentioned in classical Greek and Latin literature as the place where Julius Caesar wept bitterly before a representation of Alexander the Great and where the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal went to offer thanks for the success of his military campaign a century and a half earlier.
All these references mention “a changing environment, in contact with the sea, subject to the changing tides, in a temple where there must have been port structures and a seafaring environment,” says Milagros Alzaga, head of the Center for Underwater Archaeology (CAS), who also participated in the research.
A 3D model showing the Boqueron point in San Fernando (Cádiz) and the rectangular structure of the possible temple of Hercules Gaditanus now submerged under the Caño of Sancti Petri
Following decades of academic controversy and different proposals for the temple’s location, the one put forward now by Seville University and the IAPH falls within a radius earmarked as the most obvious.
The site is a huge marshy channel dominated by an islet and the castle of Sancti Petri, which rises above it.
For more than two centuries, the area has been yielding important archaeological finds, now on show in the Museum of Cádiz, such as large marble and bronze sculptures of Roman emperors and various statuettes from the Phoenician period.
All these discoveries helped to delineate the location of the temple of Hercules Gaditanus as lying somewhere between the slopes of the islet itself and a slither of fine sand and a rocky intertidal zone, known as Boquerón point.
World’s oldest family tree reconstructed from Stone Age tomb
A nearly 6,000-year-old tomb unearthed in England holds the remains of 27 family members, representing a five-generation lineage descended from one man and four women, researchers have found using DNA analysis.
An artist’s impression of how the Hazleton North barrow would have looked when it was newly built about 5,700 years ago.
The findings suggest there were polygamous marriages in the upper echelons of Neolithic society at that time because the researchers think it was unlikely that the ancestral man had four wives one after another; instead, he probably had more than one wife at the same time.
The analysis reconstructs one of the oldest family trees ever charted, said Iñigo Olalde, a population geneticist at the University of Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and one of the lead authors of a study published Tuesday (Dec. 22) in the journal Nature. Scientists from Harvard University in Massachusetts, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and the University of Vienna in Austria were also involved in the research.
The new techniques are likely to be quickly applied to other collections of ancient human DNA, he said. “This study is important because it’s the first large family tree that we get from prehistory,” he said. “But probably in the next few months or a year, we will get many more.”
Neolithic bones
The bones in the study were from the human remains of 35 people excavated in the 1980s from the Hazleton North barrow in the Cotswold Hills, near the twin cities of Cheltenham and Gloucester in western England.
The barrow, or burial mound, was in a farmer’s field where hundreds of years of ploughing had threatened to destroy it completely, so archaeologists carried out the excavation to preserve what was left, Olalde said.
A few years ago, a different team of researchers extracted genetic material from the bones and teeth of the entombed remains, and Olalde worked with the DNA sequences they contained to piece together how the individuals were related.
It soon became clear that the interrelationships were very complex. “When this became apparent, I thought ‘Oh my God,'” he said. “It was quite surprising, but quite fun, to find all this family.” The analysis could pin down the interrelationships from just 27 of the 35 bodies, including two young girls.
Genetic analysis of the 35 people buried in two tomb chambers in the barrow shows that 27 of them were close biological relatives.
The genetic analysis shows that five generations of one family descended from one man and four women, were buried in the two tomb chambers of the Hazleton North barrow.
The Hazleton North tomb consisted of two L-shaped chambers within a much larger barrow made of earth and stone.
The barrow had been badly damaged by farmers ploughing the land for crops, and the tomb chambers were excavated in the 1980s to preserve what was left. The bones of 35 people were found.
The results showed that the men were usually buried near their fathers and their brothers. This finding suggested that descent was patrilineal — in other words, later generations buried at the tomb were connected to the earliest generation through their male relatives, the researchers said.
But the tomb was also split into two L-shaped chambers, located in the north and south of the structure, and the choice of which chamber individuals were buried in depended on the first-generation women they were descended from — the descendants of two of the women were buried in the northern chamber, and the descendants of the other two women were buried in the southern chamber.
That finding suggested these first-generation women were also socially significant in their community and that their status was recognized when the tomb was built, Olalde said.
Family matters
Olalde also identified four men buried in the tomb whose mothers had been part of the lineage but whose fathers were not — termed “stepsons.” These stepsons could have been adopted into the family when their mothers joined it, although it was also possible that the women bore children from men outside the family who were not recognized as their partners, he said.
Two of the daughters of the lineage who had died in childhood were buried in the tomb, but no adult daughters of the lineage were buried there; instead, they may have been interred in the family tombs of their male partners, Olalde said.
In the same tomb, he also identified the remains of three women and five men who had no genetic relationship to the family. It’s possible that the women were married to men buried in the tomb and had either no children or only adult daughters who were then buried somewhere else, he said.
The significance of the five unrelated men is not known, but they may have been adopted into the family or somehow connected through relationships that can’t be determined genetically, Olalde said. The Hazleton North tomb dates to very early in the Neolithic period in England, and it’s likely that the immediate ancestors of the people buried there had come to Britain from continental Europe as part of an immigrant wave of Neolithic farmers at that time, he said.
While Neolithic tombs found on the European continent don’t show such complexity, Olalde said, the relationships between those buried in the Hazleton North tomb probably reflect much earlier kinship structures within the immigrant society.
Billionaire hands over $70 million of stolen artefacts
Michael H. Steinhardt, the billionaire hedge fund pioneer and one of New York’s most prolific antiquities collectors, has surrendered 180 stolen objects valued at $70 million and been barred for life from acquiring any other relics, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a statement Monday.
The prosecutor’s office struck an agreement with Mr. Steinhardt after a four-year multinational investigation that determined that the seized pieces had been looted and smuggled from 11 countries, trafficked by 12 illicit networks and appeared on the international art market without lawful paperwork, the office said.
“For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said, adding: “This agreement establishes that Steinhardt will be subject to an unprecedented lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities.”
Mr. Steinhardt, a Brooklyn native who turns 81 on Tuesday, is a major contributor to New York University and to numerous Jewish philanthropies. There is a Steinhardt conservatory at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and a Steinhardt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In a statement on Monday, his lawyer, Andrew J. Levander, said: “Mr. Steinhardt is pleased that the District Attorney’s yearslong investigation has concluded without any charges, and that items wrongfully taken by others will be returned to their native countries.
Many of the dealers from whom Mr. Steinhardt bought these items made specific representations as to the dealers’ lawful title to the items, and to their alleged provenance. To the extent these representations were false, Mr. Steinhardt has reserved his rights to seek recompense from the dealers involved.”
According to prosecutors, 171 of the 180 seized antiquities first surfaced in the possession of accused antiquities traffickers, including two who have been convicted in Italy — Giacomo Medici and Giovanni Becchina.
They said the investigation revealed that 101 of the items, all covered in dirt and encrustations, were visible and identifiable in photographs found in the possession of known traffickers.
Christos Tsirogiannis, an associate professor at the University of Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark, who specializes in searching photographic archives seized from antiquities dealers, said traffickers use such photos to advertise their looted wares to small groups of wealthy collectors. Dr. Tsirogiannis is one of about 60 researchers, investigators and foreign law enforcement officials credited by the prosecutors’ office with assisting in the case.
As part of its inquiry, Mr. Vance’s office said, prosecutors executed 17 search warrants and worked with officials in 11 countries — Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Turkey.
In explaining the agreement not to prosecute so long as Mr. Steinhardt abides by all its terms, Mr. Vance said the arrangement would allow for the items to be “returned expeditiously to their rightful owners” rather than being held as evidence. It would also help his office to “shield the identity of the many witnesses here and abroad whose names would be released at any trial.”
Nonetheless, the case and other recent seizures demonstrate that the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit is ready to reach far back in time to confiscate objects based on a New York state statute that allows prosecutors to return stolen property to its “rightful owners” regardless of when a theft might have occurred.
Mr. Steinhardt’s dealings with prosecutors over suspect antiquities date back to the 1990s. In 1997, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Steinhardt had illegally imported a golden bowl, known as a phiale, from Italy in 1992.
The object, dating to 450 B.C. and costing $1 million, was seized from Mr. Steinhardt’s home in 1995. The judge rejected his contention at the time that he was an “innocent owner” with no knowledge of irregularities.
In 2018, investigators raided his office and Fifth Avenue home and took away several ancient works they said had been looted from Greece and Italy. That seizure came on the heels of a 2017 seizure of a marble statue stolen from a temple in Sidon, Lebanon, which Mr. Steinhardt relinquished and which has been returned.
The 2017 seizure led to the formation of the trafficking unit, which pressed the case that was resolved on Monday. Officials said the unit has recovered more than 3,000 items valued at $200 million, and that at least 1,500 have been returned to their owners and countries of origin. It said hundreds are ready to be repatriated “as soon as the relevant countries are able to receive them amid the pandemic,” and more than 1,000 objects are being held awaiting the outcome of criminal proceedings.
(Separately, in March 2019, Mr. Steinhardt was accused of a pattern of sexual harassment by several women who worked for the nonprofits he supported.)
The confiscated items, which decorated Mr. Steinhardt’s homes and offices, and which he often lent to major museums, came mostly from Italy, Greece and Israel, according to a list compiled by investigators.
The Stag’s Head Rhyton dates back to 400 BC and was looted from Milas, Turkey.
The Larnax, a 1400-1200 BC chest for human remains taken from Crete.
The Ercolano Fresco, looted from a Roman villa in Herculaneum, near Naples.
They include:
A ceremonial libations vessel, or rhyton, that depicts a stag’s head, purchased from the Merrin Gallery of Manhattan for $2.6 million in November 1991. Officials said the item, which dates to 400 B.C., first appeared on the international art market without provenance after rampant looting in Milas, Turkey. In March 1993, prosecutors said, Mr. Steinhardt lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was when law enforcement officials seized it. It has since been repatriated.
A larnax, or small chest for human remains, from Crete, that dates between 1400-1200 B.C. Officials said the item, valued at $1 million, was purchased from a known antiquities trafficker and traced to Mr. Steinhardt through a financial institution based in Malta.
The “Ercolano Fresco,” purchased from Robert Hecht, who had faced accusations of trafficking in antiquities, “with no prior provenance” for $650,000 in November 1995. Dating to 50 B.C. and valued at $1 million, it depicts an infant Hercules strangling a snake sent by Hera to slay him. The fresco was looted in 1995 from a Roman villa in the ruins of Herculaneum, near Naples, officials said.
A gold bowl looted from Nimrud, Iraq, and purchased without provenance papers, officials said, for $150,000 in July 2020, at a time when objects from Nimrud were being trafficked by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Made of gold with a scalloped-flower design, the object surfaced in October 2019 when a Customs and Border Protection officer notified Mr. Vance’s office that someone on a flight from Hong Kong to Newark was hand-carrying the bowl for Mr. Steinhardt.
Three stone death masks that appeared to be encrusted with soil in photographs recovered by the Israeli authorities. They date to 6000 B.C. and were purchased by Mr. Steinhardt for $400,000 in October 2007.
Prosecutors said Mr. Steinhardt had owned and traded more than 1,000 antiquities since 1987, and his art collection was valued at about $200 million.
Last meal of a man mummified in a bog reconstructed after 2400 years
The Tollund Man is one of the most famous ‘bog bodies’ ever discovered in northern Europe. Even though the 30- to 40-year-old human was buried in a bog more than 2,400 years ago, the acidic peat has mummified his body to a remarkable degree, preserving his hair, brain, skin, nails, and intestines – even the leather noose around his neck.
A close-up of Tollund Man’s face.
Despite all the evidence, we still don’t really know why he was killed. An updated analysis of the man’s gut has now revealed all the contents of his last meal, and it’s looking more and more like he was some sort of human sacrifice.
Roughly a day before the Tollund Man was hung and buried in the bog, researchers say he ate porridge, containing barley, flax, and seeds from plants and weeds.
That’s similar to what scientists found in the early 1950s when the body was first unearthed in what is now modern Denmark. But unlike past analyses, this one has also noticed a few new ingredients, like the fatty proteins of fish as well as remnants of threshing waste, which comes from separating grain.
That’s an intriguing discovery, as a recent analysis of another bog body, known as the Grauballe Man, has also turned up a surprisingly large quantity of threshing waste not noticed before.
The Grauballe Man was also killed and buried in an acidic bog, and the similar contents of his last meal to the Tollund Man’s last meal may indicate a ritual of sorts.
Tollund Man on display at Museum Silkeborg.
While other bog bodies appear to have eaten porridge or bread with a side of meat or berries, threshing waste and an abundance of seeds might indicate a special occasion. Either that, or these ingredients were simply added for flavor or nutrition.
“Although the meal may reflect ordinary Iron Age fare, the inclusion of threshing waste could possibly relate to ritual practices,” the authors write.
This isn’t the first time the Tollund Man or the Grauballe Man have been suspected victims of sacrifice.
While other bog bodies found might have fallen dead or drowned in the peat by accident, the way the Tollund Man was killed and then carefully buried, with his eyes and mouth closed shut and his body in a fetal position, has some scientists thinking he was a sacrifice to the gods.
Considering that the Tollund Man was buried near a place where Iron Age people used to dig for peat, it’s possible his body represented a form of gratitude for the land.
Some Roman historian accounts from the time have even written about similar human sacrifices in northwestern Europe, although these were often biased reports that might have stretched the truth about certain tribes.
The remarkably preserved face of Tollund Man.
Apart from the way in which the Tollund Man was buried, his gut is one of the juiciest clues we have. Further research will be needed to determine whether other bog bodies also ate meals containing threshing waste or seeds, or if these were, in fact, special ingredients given to humans before they were sacrificed.
The Tollund Man may be long dead, but his mystery continues to live on.
Millet bread and pulse dough from early Iron Age South India: Charred food lumps as culinary indicators
Prof. Jennifer Bates and her coworkers, Kelly Wilcox Black and Prof. Kathleen Morrison, published a new archaeobotanical article, “Millet Bread and Pulse Dough from Early Iron Age South India: Charred Food Lumps as Culinary Indicators, ” in the Journal of Archaeological Science (Vol.137).
Jennifer is a former Postdoc in the Penn Paleoecology Lab, now an Assistant Professor at Seoul National University, Kelly is a PhD student at the University of Chicago, completing her dissertation. Kathleen is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the paper, the authors explore charred lumps from the site of Kadebakele, in southern India, where they have excavated for several years with the support of the Archaeological Survey of India and colleagues.
The site dates from around 2,300 BCE to CE 1600 or so, but these data are from the Early Iron Age, about 800 BC. Charred lumps are usually seen as not identifiable, but using high-quality imaging, they were able to show that (some of) these are charred remains of dough or batter; these would have been used to make bread-like dishes.
Comparing the data with experimental studies done by another lab group, they identified two kinds of food lumps, along with cattle dung lumps (likely fuel).
They found a dough made primarily from millets that match the experimental results of “flatbreads” most closely. Millet flatbreads are still made in this region.
There was also a batter made primarily from pulses (beans, lentils, etc.). This highlights the great importance of pulses in the diet, something is also seen in the overall botanical assemblage.
As far as we know, there hasn’t been any previous understanding of how these foods might have been prepared, and this paper is the first glimpse at food making in South Asian prehistory.
The work contributes to our understanding of cooking, diet, and daily life in the South Indian Iron Age, a period without historical documents, and also establishes the value of a data source previously assumed to be too difficult to study on a routine basis (that is, without using SEM).
Professor Bates, Ms Wilcox Black and Professor Morrison argue that work like this allows archaeologists to move beyond “taxa lists” (lists of plants and animals used — you could think of these as possible ‘ingredients’) to approach issues of culinary practice (combinations of ingredients as well as techniques).
Another “Erased” Black Cemetery Identified in Florida
An unmarked African American cemetery with hundreds of graves has been found at the site of a downtown office building in Clearwater, Fla. It’s at least the fourth abandoned African American cemetery rediscovered in recent years in Florida. The finds are forcing communities to come to terms with their history and racist policies that targeted Black neighbourhoods.
Barbara Sorey-Love has experienced some of that history firsthand. She was born in the basement of Clearwater’s hospital 69 years ago and grew up in Clearwater Heights, a neighbourhood that no longer exists.
“Back then we were called coloured,” she says. “That’s where the coloured mothers and children were housed.”
Archaeologists work to uncover graves at the former site of the Zion cemetery found underneath the Robles Park Village housing complex in Tampa, Fla. Another unmarked African-American cemetery with hundreds of graves has been found at the site of a downtown office building in Clearwater, Fla.
Several years ago, Sorey-Love helped form the Clearwater Heights Reunion Committee, a group of people who grew up in the neighbourhood before it became a victim of urban renewal. The group began asking questions about the old St. Matthews cemetery. It was closed in the mid-1950s and sold to developers who were supposed to move the graves to a new location.
Using ground-penetrating radar and later by excavating, archaeologists found something many residents had suspected — most of the graves had never been moved. Sorey-Love recently visited the excavation site, now an office building’s parking lot.
“I went over and looked in the burial site,” she says. “And it was like the skeleton was looking up at me saying, ‘Thank God you found me.'”
Archaeologists believe several hundred people may be buried under the parking lot and a building that now stands on the site. It’s not the only African American cemetery recently rediscovered in Clearwater. A little over a mile away, an investigation has found dozens of graves at the site of a now shuttered public school. In both cases, community members are working with local officials to decide what to do next.
And it’s not just happening in Clearwater. Just across the bay in Tampa, investigations conducted by the Tampa Bay Times helped uncover at least two more African American cemeteries that were abandoned and built over. Some of the graves are under the parking lot at Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays. Hundreds more were found at the site of a public housing complex.
In all these cases, Black residents were told the graves had been relocated.
“There were bodies still there and a large number of them,” says Antoinette Jackson, chair of the anthropology department at the University of South Florida says. “That caught everybody’s attention.”
The cemeteries were all closed in the 1950s, as cities around Florida’s Tampa Bay began to grow rapidly in the post-war era. Property that had been developed and used by the Black community was taken for other uses and neighbourhoods were wiped out by interstate exchanges. Jackson says the cemeteries were deliberately forgotten.
“Oftentimes,” she says, “we don’t use the word lost or abandoned. We are really saying erased, physically erased from the landscape for other purposes.”
In Clearwater, city council records from the mid-1950s show officials discussed using road improvements as an “inducement to confine Negro home building and purchasing to the existing area.”
Jeff Moates, with the Florida Public Archaeology Network, worked on the cemetery investigation in Clearwater. He says assessments levied by the city were “used as a tactic to kind of isolate the African American community. There were certain policies that further marginalized an already marginalized group of people.”
The land was used for a new shopping centre. The city paid the developers to move the graves to a new location. But, with the discovery of hundreds of graves still on the site, Clearwater officials are facing tough decisions. The company that now owns the property says it received assurances that the graves had been moved.
At a recent meeting, city councilman Mark Bunker said he was struck by what he saw in the archaeological report.
“We weren’t on the commission at that time,” he says, “but, the city does have some responsibility in dealing with this.”
Another councilman said he wasn’t sure the city should be held responsible for something done nearly 70 years ago. Meanwhile, investigations will continue on the site. The rediscovery of lost or erased Black cemeteries raises many issues, including who’s liable for righting past wrongs. A task force created by the state legislature will soon issue a report with recommendations for local and state officials.
University of South Florida anthropologist Antoinette Jackson recently helped create the Black cemetery network, a website and organization linking African American cemeteries that are being rediscovered and investigated around the country. The idea, she says is “to put a face and stories and people and communities on the map and in the public domain.”
A bill is also in the works in Congress that would create an African American Burial Grounds Network under the direction of the National Park Service.
