TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2010


KLMNO timbuctoo from A1


tells you he has no idea where it is.


Timbuctoo has always been a


secret kind of a place. Had to be, because it was part of the Under- ground Railroad. There are new- er houses here now where some descendants of original settlers still live. But much of the physi- cal history of Timbuctoo is bur- ied underground. Based on a geo- physical survey, archaeologists believe that foundations of a whole village of perhaps 18 houses and a church dating back to the 1820s lies beneath layers of dirt. In June, those archaeologists


from Temple University in Phila- delphia began unraveling Tim- buctoo’s secrets, excavating the hill next to a Civil War cemetery where African American troops are buried. The discoveries are fragile and ordinary artifacts of everyday life — jars for medi- cines and cosmetics, pieces of shoes, dinner plates — but to the people unearthing them, they are invaluable.


‘Story of the oppressed’


Archaeological excavation of African American communities such as Timbuctoo is booming across the country, spurred by an increasing number of prominent black academics and politicians and a proliferation of museums dedicated to African American history, whose curators are eager to display the artifacts. (Archae- ologists had known about the hill in Timbuctoo for years, but it wasn’t until a recently appointed black mayor of the township of Westampton, Sidney Camp, pur- sued a geophysical survey did the excavation begin.) “It is very important that these


excavations take place,” said Rex Ellis, associate director of curato- rial affairs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open on the Mall in 2015. “The tradition has been to overlook these things in the past. There have not been archaeologists specifically searching for these kinds of treasures. For us, this activity will contribute appreciably to our understanding of African Americans as builders and con- tributors to this nation.” Archaeologists involved in the


excavations say they are helping to rewrite an incomplete history — adding evidence of resistance, not just physical oppression; evi- dence of integration, not just seg- regation. They are, they say, un- earthing evidence not only of lives endured in slavery, but also of whole communities of escaped slaves hiding in small, self-suffi- cient communities. “Historical records are biased and written from a certain per- spective. People we are working with haven’t had control over the narrative of the past,” said Paul Shackel, professor of anthropolo- gy at the University of Maryland. “People wrote about them, but wrote from their perspective. If you read the diary of what people thought of African Americans, it is atrocious. It’s racist. . . . We are . . . helping to provide the story of the oppressed and helping to make it public.” Aside from researching their own questions, some of the ar- chaeologists are asking descend- ants and communities what they want to know. This practice spread after the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Pro- tection and Repatriation Act, which required archaeologists to repatriate human burial and fu- nerary objects, prompting con- sultation with descendants, Shackel said. A Temple student working with Orr is conducting interviews with Timbuctoo de- scendants to help guide the dig. Christopher Fennell, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, says com- munities connected to old black towns are saying: “ ‘Don’t tell us about brutality in the past. Tell us about how African Americans overcame racism.’ There is much more focus on free African Amer- icans like Timbuctoo.” Research- ers are focusing, for example, on how blacks participated in the Underground Railroad. “The un- told story,” Fennell says, “is that it was really run by free and en- slaved African Americans help- ing slaves to escape.” Akey development came in the early 1990s as archaeologists be- gan working on what has become known as the African Burial Ground in New York. During ex- cavation for a new federal office building, construction workers discovered remains of 419 men, women and children buried dur- ing the 17th and 18th centuries in


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From Page One


A9 As archaeologists go to Timbuctoo, N.J., secrets of freeman life could be liberated


Archaeologists excavate what they think might have been a house in Timbuctoo, N.J. Artifacts from the site, including jars and chips of dinner plates, may shed light on the lives of the freed blacks who founded the community in the 1820s.


TEMPLE UNIVERSITY


a six-acre burial ground in Lower Manhattan, records show. The cemetery had been covered over for years by buildings and land- fill.


Researchers discovered that the burial grounds included slaves as well as free blacks. Sci- entific studies of the remains at the burial ground brought home the physical atrocities of slavery — tooth defects caused by mal- nutrition, anemia, high infant mortality and evidence of “im- pact trauma.” Studies found “ab- normal outgrowths of bone tis- sue in response to stress,” Fennell says. “The analysts identified this malady as the result of the indi- viduals having been forced to lift and carry very heavy loads.” But they also found other de- tails: a belt of blue beads around the waist of a woman and inlaid tin symbols on a man’s coffin, matching burial customs in West Africa. These findings suggested that the connection to Africa had not been severed as cleanly as tales told in some history books. At the Hermitage in Tennessee, which was the home of President Andrew Jackson, archaeologists are excavating the slave quarters to find out more about how the slave population survived op- pression. In New Mexico, archae- ologists are unearthing a town called Blackdom, which was founded in 1901, by Frank Boyer, a black man who was said to have


walked thousands of miles from Georgia to New Mexico to estab- lish a town for black people. “He wanted to create a place he could be free and he got other families to come join him,” says Juanita Moore, president and CEO of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, the largest museum dedicated to African American history in the country. “The town existed for about eight years until the artesian spring vanished. They ran out of water, then they dispersed and went to other cities. Now there are foun- dations of some of the houses.” Some sites offer evidence of the business acumen of freed black men. In Illinois, archaeol- ogists are unearthing New Phila- delphia, one of the earliest towns in the country founded by a black man. In 1836, Frank McWorter, who was born into slavery, pur- chased his wife’s freedom for $800 with money he earned from extra work in a mine. He then purchased his own freedom at $800 and went on to buy 42 acres of land in Pike County, Ill. Mc- Worter subdivided the land, sold lots and used the proceeds to buy the freedom of 16 more family members. New Philadelphia, which had an integrated school, faded after 1869 when a new railroad by- passed the town, an act some re- searchers attribute to racism. In


2004, Shackel and archaeological students began digging to inves- tigate issues of race and class in New Philadelphia, which was re- cently listed in the National Reg- ister of Historic Places. Even the most ordinary items, such as the early-20th-century jars that once contained Vicks VapoRub and Dixie Peach Po- made now being unearthed in Timbuctoo, are significant to ar- chaeologists. They tell “a lot about how people lived,” Moore says. “They are not gold or jew- els, but they say how important lives of everyday people are. That will tell the story of the majority of people as opposed to the few.”


The lives of free blacks Timbuctoo was founded in the


1820s when Quaker abolitionists sold land to black men. In 1860, according to the census, Timbuc- too had 150 residents and 37 dwellings. The excavation “docu- ments an unappreciated and poorly represented aspect of American history because we are talking about lives of free black people when the current narra- tive is [that] we didn’t exist,” said Guy Weston, whose ancestor was one of the original settlers in Timbuctoo. “There were black people who hadn’t been slaves in a lifetime, like my great-grand- mother.” The community thrived until about 1930 when people began


moving away to find jobs during the Great Depression, research- ers say. The houses deteriorated over many years and were even- tually razed, leaving behind underground foundations. Ar- chaeologists are unclear about how some structures ended up covered by the hill at the end of the road. “No other structures, apart from the cemetery, still stand” that date to Timbuctoo’s found- ing, says Christopher Barton, a doctoral student in archaeology who is the site manager at Tim- buctoo. The last original struc- ture “was the church AME Zion. That was torn down about 10 years ago,” he says. The artifacts found indicate how people survived despite rac- ism and discrimination. Archae- ologists have found flatware and other items that were not pur- chased in local shops but likely through catalogues. “If they bought something national,” Bar- ton said, “they didn’t have to deal with racism on local levels.” Donald Nixon grew up in Tim-


buctoo, and never knew some- thing more was beneath it, bur- ied within. “We used to hunt rab- bits here,” he says.


Sophronia Boyd Demby, 82, whose parents bought land here in 1936, is standing outside the excavation site. Shaded by a white straw hat, she points to a round object sticking out of a lay- er of dirt. “You think that is a piece of leather?” Patricia Markert, 21, a field as- sistant, reaches for it. “I think it’s a ceramic bowl,” she says. Mary Weston, 74, lives in a house down the road from the site. Her great-great-great-grand- father bought a lot in Timbuctoo in 1829 for $38. “What they find there helps me understand who we were then,” she says, sitting in her living room. She has seen the recovered artifacts, and they re- mind her of her childhood and stories her grandmother told about living in Timbuctoo. Weston opens her family Bible on her lap and gingerly turns its fragile pages. The Bible is held to- gether by a brown leather belt. Within its pages are recorded the births, the marriages, the deaths of her ancestors in Timbuctoo. “How can you know who you really are if you don’t know from whence you came?” browndl@washpost.com


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