ABSTRACT
In 1991, On A Site several blocks to the east of the World Trade Center, archaeologists uncovered human remains in the area now preserved and designated as the African Burial Ground and the Commons Historic District. It is estimated that the eighteenth-century cemetery contained the remains of as many as 20,000 of the city’s first African Americans, predominantly slaves who made up 40 percent of the original Dutch colony and up to 20 percent of the English colony. Though the burial ground had been very clearly marked on old maps and surveys of the city, it had been built on successively since the late 1700s, and, at the time of the dig, was being excavated to make way for a new high-rise federal building. When the bones came to light, embarrassing the construction engineers, the cemetery was said to have been “rediscovered.” Disregard for its existence over the centuries suggested all too clearly that the memory of this Colonial slave population had become inconvenient to New Yorkers inclined to view their city as a bastion of the freedom-loving North. Forensic examination of the remains showed the wear and tear of severe physical hardship incurred through labor and lack of nutrition, and during the slave ships’ passage. Many of the dead appear to have been literally “worked to death.” Not only had their resting place been forgotten, but the marks of their suffering illustrated how they had been palpable victims of the earliest, belligerent efforts of the Dutch West India Company to use Lower Manhattan to service international mercantile trade routes.
