once upon a cemetery archaeology dig

intersections between the living and the dead

content warning: pictures of blood? i don’t really know if anyone needs that but just in case

look, i realise it’s been ages since i posted on this but let’s just all pretend i’ve been doing posts this whole time as a fun secret between friends. especially if my publisher asks you.

i wanted to jump back into things with a little show and tell moment. part of it is fun and interesting, and part of it is sad, but for me it’s a nice midpoint between the two.

i mentioned in a previous post that i used to intern in the city archaeology lab. while i was there, the city hired us to conduct a pre-construction dig at a nearby cemetery; the firehouse - next door to the cemetery - was being renovated. (anytime there’s a concern about disarticulated remains at a construction site, cities and towns are required to call in archaeologists or anthropologists.)

this cemetery, today called Eliot Burying Ground, was sometimes referred to as the Eustis St Burying Ground or Old Roxbury Burying Ground, is the oldest extant burying ground in Roxbury, and one of the 3 oldest in Boston metro, with the first interment made in 1633. burying here stopped in 1854 with the exception of family tombs, so it’s had a fair expanse of colonial history. its current name, Eliot, is the surname of one of the more prominent dead members of its population - John Eliot, d 1690, who was a reverend and missionary. he is mostly known for his work translating the english bible texts into the Massachusett language as part of his goal to convert them. later those same texts would be used to force the Wampanoag and other tribes into “praying towns,” so, you know. not a great look.

that’s enough history for now. this post isn’t about any of the inhabitants of the Eliot Burying Ground, but about the surrounding alive community.

i was part of the dig staff in 2009. 2009 was not a great year for the economy, as my fellow millennials may recall. we went into the site with the plan to excavate as much dirt near the falling wall of the old firehouse as possible, which the reasonable expectation that we’d end up having a bunch of broken, buried gravestone pieces and some disarticulated remains on our hands.

this is the collapsing firehouse prior to the dig beginning. picture by me, 2009

i mention it’s 2009 because of the unexpected artefacts we ended up finding during the course of the dig. this part of Boston, both in 2009 and today, is largely a black community. i mention this only because its relevant.

only a few weeks into the dig, when we were still not finding cool things and just moving dirt around, we opened the gate one morning and discovered the cemetery grounds were being used for another purpose overnight.

of course, i had no idea what i was looking at, and probably neither will you. this is the first thing i saw that morning.

this liquid is exactly what you think it is! picture by me, 2009

if you are like: is that blood? yes, you’re correct. it’s very much blood. a lovely rained upon puddle of blood on top of an old tomb.

i’m white, from the suburbs, and i’ve lived a relatively sheltered life. i’ve also consumed an ungodly amount of crime television, so my first instinct is that all of us are about to be standing in the location of a gruesome murder. thankfully, our director was there before i could start screaming my head off and/or traipsing around looking for the rest of the theoretical dead guy.

one of the coolest things about cemeteries and burying grounds is that they’ve always been home to non-dead people stuff. in the early colonial days, they were also grounds where people grazed their animals, and often, they were used as fort sites during times of combat. in later history, they became sites of quiet contemplation as the victorian romanticisation of death lead us to the creation of burial grounds with arboretums and gardens. but we’ve always used these spaces not just as a tangible place to remember our dead, but to commemorate the life that surrounds them, too. it’s very momento mori of us.

so there we are, walking into work, and facing not an insignificant amount of blood on a tombstone. and not just that, either - after a few minutes of wandering around apprehensively, our director finds a bag under one of the braces by the firehouse.

here’s a picture of said bag - but trust me, you don’t wanna see what was in there.

she pokes the bag with a stick, and to our extreme delight, it’s not random human parts. but it is a head - of a chicken. that head is also pretty likely the source of the blood on the stone. because if it walks like a beheaded chicken, and talks like a beheaded chicken, well then, it’s probably a beheaded chicken.

our director is the only person grinning at this discovery, and it’s because she exactly what’s going on - this site has become a place for locals to practise Santeria.

Santeria is an afro-caribbean religion that has ties to the slave trade, when it was practised as a form of resistance. it’s kind of an intersection between a west african religion called Yoruba and a general spiritualism with a bit of catholicism in there for fun. i am not an expert in this or even close to, so this is my very high level understanding.

notice how it does not say you can’t practise religions in here. loopholes!

to our surprise, the director has seen this before. it’s one of those things you learn about cemeteries in urban areas - sometimes they are a quiet place to do or sell drugs, and sometimes they are a quiet place to practise a generational religion born from trauma and resistance with the hope of improving your family’s finances or to cure an illness. (and sometimes both!)

i almost stepped directly onto this one morning, so for this and other reasons, like grave depressions making the grounds unstable, i always advise cemetery visitors to please stay on the paths or watch their feet at all times

it’s not uncommon across the states to see Santeria artefacts in or around cemeteries, especially during financial depressions. here’s an article from an instance in Florida in 2019. here’s another - also from Florida - in 2023. (fuck me up, Florida!)

as the dig went on, we’d find more and more curious leftovers that suggested the practise was ongoing - but, thankfully for my anxiety, no more heads. at least no more animal heads. i can’t say we didn’t find a disarticulated head or two.

the most interesting thing about it is the role the Eliot Burying Ground played in its community is that it was dependent on the time of day. we couldn’t stay after dusk (city rules!) and it seemed as soon as we left, it became some other place entirely. to me, it seemed like - and i hate making this reference, by the way - the room of requirement in that wizard series with Daniel Radcliffe. (i refuse to recognise the author.) it was whatever its people needed it to be.

cemeteries are still playing the multi-service role today, it just looks a little different than animal grazing or victorian laying about with large lace umbrellas and uncomfortable undergarments. if anything, the role they play is more important than the others, because we’ve strayed pretty far from being comfortable with death. so whatever we end up doing in cemeteries - spiritualism, drugs, having sex on our own mothers’ grave (looking at you, mary shelly) - at least we’re in there. looking at all the symbolism we’ve created over hundreds of years to remind us that someday, we’ll also be gone.

but if we’re lucky, maybe someday our tombs will get to play host to a Santeria ritual or two.