WHISTLING PAST THE HISTORIC GRAVEYARD

The inadvertent discovery of historic burials during a construction project in Philadelphia has revealed lax and confusing historic preservation laws in this historically-rich city.

By Tamara Jager Stewart

ON JANUARY 26, 2017, Kimberlee Moran, the director of forensic science at Rutgers University-Camden in New Jersey, and Anna Dhody, a forensic anthropologist and director of the Mütter Research Institute in Philadelphia, visited a construction site in Philadelphia’s Old City Historic District. The site, a vacant lot at 218 Arch Street, is where the developer, PMC Property Group, plans to build an apartment complex. In November of 2016, Moran and Dhody had read a Philly.com story that a construction crew with Fastrack Builders, which was hired by PMC, had uncovered human remains while excavating the lot with heavy equipment. So Moran and Dhody contacted PMC and asked permission to recover a small box of bones for analysis and to survey the site. “There were bones on the surface of the grounds,” said Moran, and they were clearly from humans. They collected some bones—“enough to fi t in a shoebox,” Moran recalled— for analysis. Before departing, they offered to monitor the excavation on a voluntary basis in the likely event that more remains were uncovered, but PMC declined.

Approximately three weeks later, Moran and Dhody were contacted by the construction foreman: the workers had uncovered more bones and they didn’t know what to do with them. As the construction project continued, many more bones, and in some cases entire skeletons enclosed in their caskets, were uncovered. It turns out that a portion of the lot at 218 Arch Street covers the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery, which was in service from 1707 to the mid 1800s, when the First Baptist Church moved to another location. It was assumed that all of the graves in its cemetery were removed and reinterred in Mount Moriah Cemetery in another part of Philadelphia at that time. But after researching the historical archives, Moran and Dhody realized it was possible that many more bodies were still buried in the vacant lot. “If records are correct, thousands of (bodies) were interred in this cemetery.”

From February twentieth to March seventh, PMC

mütter research institute A team of archaeologists and volunteers excavate the site in March.

A coffin containing a skeleton is placed on a plywood board (top) and then wrapped in plastic before being taken to the laboratory. allowed them to monitor the construction work. “We had to rearrange our lives trying to make sure someone was at the site,” Moran said. But try as they did, there were times when they were unable to be on the site. Then, from March seventh to the thirteenth, PMC let Moran, Dhody, and a team of about a dozen volunteers they hastily assembled excavate the human remains. By the end of their time on the site, having excavated seventy-eight burials, the archaeologists had dug down to a sterile layer with no bones or associated artifacts. They had recovered all of the First Baptist Cemetery’s human remains. Or so they thought.

“THIS IS A FAIRLY regular occurrence” in Philadelphia, Moran said of uncovering unmarked burials during construction projects. “But still, it always throws everyone into confusion.” Despite having researched Pennsylvania historic preservation laws, Moran and Dhody were uncertain as to how the remains should be handled. If they took the skeletons to Moran’s laboratory at Rutgers in New Jersey, would they be violating a law by transporting the bones across a state line? One local archaeologist, who Moran wouldn’t name, chastised her and Dhody for getting involved in PMC’s project and thereby giving it a veneer of respectability. “You’re going to set Philadelphia archaeology back thirty years,” the archaeologist scolded Moran. The archaeologist was of no help when Moran asked for advice about how to handle the skeletons.

PMC owns the land and the construction project is privately funded; consequently federal preservation laws such as NAGPRA and the National Historic Preservation Act are not in force. And there is a debate as to whether any state and local laws apply. The City of Philadelphia, which issued the permit to PMC to build the apartments, argued that there is no law that compelled it to stop the construction project once the human remains were uncovered, or to take any responsibility for them. A lawyer for PMC echoed the city’s argument.

Doug Mooney and Mark Zecca dispute that contention. Mooney is an archaeologist and the president of the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum (PAF), a nonprofit organization that protects and preserves the city’s archaeological resources. He stated that there is a protocol for dealing with human remains that is “codified in numerous Pennsylvania statutes.” That protocol mandates that the police and medical examiner be alerted so that an investigation can be conducted to determine if the remains are associated with a recent crime or are historical. If the remains are historical, as they are in this case, the property owner must petition the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court for permission to exhume and rebury them in another cemetery. The Orphans’ Court has legal jurisdiction over any unmarked graves or burial grounds, which is to say the court has jurisdiction over remains for which there are no known descendants or other persons who can represent them.

Zecca, a private attorney who is representing the PAF

and who previously worked as a senior attorney for the city for twenty years, argued that the state’s Probate, Estates and Fiduciaries Code determines who has the authority to dispose of remains in situations like this. “If you’re going to disinter or reinter (human remains) you have to have approval of next of kin or a court order,” he said.

But for months PMC had neither as its construction crew continued to uncover burials at 218 Arch Street. PMC was excavating the bones with backhoes and disposing of the excavated dirt and associated items in a landfill. There were allegations that bones were being dumped in the landfill along with the dirt. Jonathan Stavin, executive vice president of PMC, said that numerous bones were uncovered, and “it’s absolutely possible that some remains” ended up in a landfill, but if so “it wasn’t intentional.” Though PMC has been in business for several decades, this is the first time a construction project of theirs has uncovered an unmarked cemetery. “I refuse to let anyone paint us as this big, callous developer,” he said. “We did everything in our power to comport with the law, or lack thereof. We treated everyone and everything found with respect.”

According to accounts in the local media, when human bones were first uncovered in October of 2016, the police and the Medical Examiner’s Office were alerted by an anonymous caller, rather than by PMC. (Stavin said PMC called city officials when the bones were discovered.) Representatives from the Medical Examiner’s Office visited the site and found no evidence of criminal activity, but they didn’t instruct PMC to petition the Orphans’ Court. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Philadelphia’s Historical Commission, and the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, which issued PMC’s permit to build the apartment complex, were also informed, all of whom said they had no authority to intervene in this situation. So the project continued.

Then in June, Stephan Salisbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer received an anonymous call, presumably from a member of the construction crew, informing Salisbury that human bones were scattered throughout the site. As of early March, the project was receiving a considerable amount of media attention. (Moran and Dhody had thought about informing the media before then, but Moran said PMC discouraged them from doing so, and they feared if they did PMC would forbid them to work at the site.) The city urged PMC to hire a cultural resource management firm to excavate the remains, and in July PMC chose AECOM. By mid September, when AECOM’s excavation had concluded, nearly 500 sets of human remains had been exhumed from the lot and given to Moran’s group for storage and future analysis at Rutgers University-Camden.

Before the remains were reinterred, the city advised PMC to petition the Orphans’ Court and request a ruling as to how to proceed. In August, the Orphans’ Court judge

Students clean and document the exterior of a coffin prior to excavating it.

Volunteer Chelsea Saal-Cordle examines one of the skeletons for abnormalities and evidence of trauma.

issued a preliminary decree asserting the court’s sole legal jurisdiction over the remains and gave PMC until August, 2020 to analyze and rebury the skeletons, either at Mount Moriah or another acceptable Philadelphia cemetery.

“The issue of unmarked historic burials and burial grounds being impacted by construction is one that the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum, and I personally, have been working on for at least ten years,” said Mooney, who also serves on the Philadelphia Historical Commission’s Historic Designation Committee. “There has never been an archaeologist on the historical commission,” he said, and no archaeologists have served on the commission’s staff since 1989. “In the absence of anyone with specific expertise in dealing with archaeological resources, the commission has simply done nothing to protect them.” Mooney has documented eightyfive instances in Philadelphia in which historic cemeteries were disturbed or merely exposed since 1800.

Salisbury has been writing about the uncovering of the First Baptist Church Cemetery as well as similar occurrences. “It happens all the time,” he said. “Most often, no one hears about it because the developer quietly tosses the bones into the dumpster and no one is the wiser.”

Though Moran is no fan of PMC’s, she said “I can’t really blame them, because there’s an absence of regulation and an absence of enforcement.” For this she blamed the city. Mooney agreed. “Because the city never stepped in to take charge,” he said, “there’s an unknown number of graves that were disturbed or destroyed.” He called the city’s argument that PMC was not legally obligated to immediately petition the Orphans’ Court upon uncovering human remains “ridiculous,” and added that it ensures “it’s going to happen again.”

“There is a law, but there’s no enforcement of the law,” said Zecca. “The average person on the street” knows enough not to throw away human remains. “The (city’s) law department is running and hiding from its legal obligation,” he said “I believe that the Mayor and the Commissioner of Licenses and Inspections have their hearts in the right places and would do the right thing if the city’s law department properly advised them of their authority.”

This past summer a public forum was held regarding the city’s unmarked burials, at which Mooney proposed a plan for dealing with the issue that included listing all historic cemeteries on the state Register of Cultural Properties and giving the Philadelphia Historical Commission legal authority over them. The plan also suggests that the city pass an ordinance establishing a clear process and protocol for treating unmarked burials.

PAF has developed a database of the city’s historic

The People Who Were Buried There

Most of the individuals in the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery were simply buried in shrouds, although one man was found with cufflinks and one juvenile had gold ring clusters in both shoulder areas. A few associated artifacts such as ceramic pipe stems were found in the dirt fill around the coffins. Kimberlee Moran is working with AECOM archaeologists to obtain their field notes, photographs, site maps, and other data in order to better understand the remains in context. “We will use all that information as well as the burial records to narrow down the dates,” she said. “We want to be able to stitch all this data together.” In the rush to quickly recover the burials prior to construction, researchers and volunteers didn’t have time to fully document each individual before removal. “The constraints we were under did limit the information we were able to obtain on site during excavation,” said Moran. Without headstones and a map of the cemetery, many key questions remain, such as the identities of the buried individuals. The First Baptist Church’s archives have “very good records that we are going through now, looking at various lists of people buried at the cemetery, trying to determine which remains had been moved, and to find a map,” Moran said. Numerous individuals were recovered in their intact coffins. “We are trying to document and recover these, sampling soil, wood from the coffins, and collecting data regarding coffin hardware such as handles, decorative plates, nails, and screws, for which a relative chronology exists.” AECOM did remove juvenile coffins intact, but adults were taken out of deteriorating coffins and put in boxes, so Moran’s team is trying to match the coffin assemblages with the individuals, a very challenging and time-consuming task. The researchers hope to work with the descendant community of the individuals to find out more about their lives and possibly to undertake facial reconstruction and conduct DNA analysis of some of the remains so they can be grouped by families. “There are lots of individuals with quite phenomenal soft tissue preservation,” said Moran. “Lots of brains were found preserved, and even a man’s moustache. Some of the coffins were badly deteriorated, so we’re not sure why some had such great preservation. We are doing soil analysis to try to understand this.” The researchers would like to study the preserved brains and other tissue to better understand the health and pathologies of the burial population, one of which had evidence of an autopsy having been done, something very uncommon in the eighteenth century, and another who possibly had syphilis. “But this analysis is far away. We have four to six months more of skeletal washing before any analysis can take place,” Moran said. A number of potential relatives of the buried individuals have contacted her offering samples of their DNA for comparative analysis, but DNA sampling of the burials is destructive and analysis is very expensive, so for now they are just keeping the names on file. Moran and her crew of students and professional volunteers were relieved this summer when the Orphans’ Court gave them until 2020 to work with the remains before they must be reinterred. “Now this gives us a level of certainty so we can apply for funding for future analysis. We’ve been dropping everything else in order to focus on this,” Moran said, “so now we have a little time.” –Tamara Jager Stewart

A late eighteenth-century coffin handle.

These gold rings were found in a juvenile’s coffin.

cemeteries, and is in the process of making it available to the public. “By making this data available we hope that developers will be able to make informed decisions about whether or not to purchase particular properties that once contained burial grounds, or to provide them with advanced warning that archaeological investigations might be necessary to confirm the presence of burial remains,” Mooney said.

But the city, which is planning a $500 million renovation of its parks, playgrounds, and recreation centers, many of which Mooney and Moran suspect were built on top of unmarked burials, is looking to the state to enact legislation. “Given Pennsylvania’s rich history, this type of situation is unlikely to be limited to Philadelphia, and we would like to see a statewide law enacted to address it,” said Ajeenah Amir, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office. “Currently Pennsylvania does not have such a law, and the statutes on the books that regulate related matters—such as cemeteries, disinterment, and burials—are insufficient and in some cases, contradictory.”

“I have to be optimistic that the situation might soon be changing,” said Mooney. Mayor Jim Kenney recently launched the Mayor’s Task Force on Historic Preservation, of which Mooney is a member. “We only just recently started work for the task force and we’ll see how effective I can be advocating for archaeology.”

Philadelphia “is the custodian of so much of the nation’s history,” Zecca noted. The city should take this obligation more seriously. After all, “the dead in a very old cemetery have no one to speak up for them.”

TAMARA JAGER STEWART is the assistant editor of American Archaeology and the Conservancy’s Southwest region projects coordinator.

A Glimpse Of The Zuni

The Conservancy obtains Tinaja Pueblo.

Mark Michel, the president of the Conservancy, walks behind an excavated masonry room.

The Conservancy recently acquired Tinaja Pueblo, a proto-Zuni site located near the foothills of the Zuni Mountains in the El Morro Valley of northeastern New Mexico. Named after the nearby abandoned Village of Tinaja that was established in the 1860s by several farming and ranching families, this thirteenth-century masonry pueblo has more than 130 rooms. A large, associated stone roomblock is situated on a small mesa about thirty feet above the valley fl oor, and several smaller roomblocks were built around the base of the mesa.

The gated subdivision of El Morro Ranches surrounds the forty-acre tract containing Tinaja Pueblo on three sides. The Village of Tinaja served as a stopping place for travelers and pioneers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by 1940 it was deserted, with just a few stone foundations and a small cemetery remaining.

Archaeologist Leslie Spier fi rst recorded Tinaja Pueblo in 1917, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that test excavations were conducted there by the Cibola Archaeological Research Project, directed by the noted archaeologist Patty Jo Watson. The Cibola archaeologists were able to obtain tree ring cutting dates from beams of A.D. 1270 and 1284, indicating that construction of the pueblo took place during that time. A few excavated rooms can be seen on the site today, which were probably left uncovered by the Cibola archaeologists. The site is within a few miles of the Conservancy’s Scribe-S and Spier 142 preserves, both contemporaneous proto-Zuni sites that likely had interactions with Tinaja and with each other. One of the excavated rooms appears to be a burned storeroom.

In the book Zuni Origins, linguist Jane Hill concludes winter • 2017-18

that the Zuni language is a linguistic isolate unrelated to any other Southwestern native language. “Zuni speakers have been present in the Southwest for a minimum of 7,000 to 8,000 years,” Hill postulated, placing its linguistic origins near the beginning of the Archaic Period. Zuni oral histories recount an emergence from a place deep in a canyon along the Little Colorado River, probably the Grand Canyon. Their migration accounts take the group to the San Francisco Peaks, which tower above present-day Flagstaff. The oral histories speak of the Zuni breaking into smaller groups at various points in time, with some groups traveling south, east, and north into parts of Arizona and New Mexico, including the Rio Grande Valley, and fi nally converging at the “Middle Place,” roughly interpreted as the current Zuni Reservation.

In looking at the archaeological evidence within the upper drainage of the Zuni River in New Mexico, which loosely defi nes the core Zuni culture area, sites have been identifi ed that span the full period of human occupation from Paleo-Indian through Spanish Contact and into the modern era. In the Zuni culture area, the transition from pit houses to above-ground structures occurred during the period from A.D. 900 to 1100, along with a movement to higher elevations.

The early pueblos tended to be small, containing just four to twelve rooms, usually with a kiva built in front of the main roomblock. By A.D. 1300, the trend of living in small, dispersed pueblos dramatically changed when the Zuni began building pueblos containing 400 to 1,400 rooms. The population also shifted to the western end of the culture area. When the Spanish arrived in A.D. 1539, they found almost the entire Zuni population living in six or seven large pueblos along the Zuni River just east of what is now the New Mexico-Arizona state line.

In 1999, the Conservancy collaborated with the Zuni Pueblo Cultural Resource Enterprise, the pueblo’s contract archaeology fi rm, and the Lannon Foundation in Santa Fe, to acquire, map, backfi ll, and preserve a portion of the ancestral Zuni site known as Box-S Pueblo that was slated for development into a subdivision. Located about twenty-fi ve miles northeast of Tinaja, Box-S is a 1,100-room stone pueblo that straddled the Zuni Reservation boundary. Occupied between A.D. 1260 and 1285, the 160-acre, privately-owned portion of the site purchased by the Conservancy is now part of the Zuni Reservation.

The owner of Tinaja Pueblo, who also developed the El Morro Ranch subdivision, passed away recently and the property was listed on the open market to facilitate the settlement of her estate. The Conservancy negotiated a purchase price of $40,000 cash at closing. The Conservancy will be developing a management plan for Tinaja Pueblo with the assistance of Zuni Pueblo, local archaeologists, and the State Historic Preservation Division. —Jim Walker

POINT Acquisitions

Tinaja Pueblo

The Protect Our Irreplaceable National Treasures (POINT) program was designed to save signifi cant (POINT) program was designed to save signifi cant sites that are in immediate danger of destruction. sites that are in immediate danger of destruction.