Date Thesis Awarded
5-2009
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Anthropology
Advisor
Michael L. Blakey
Committee Members
Frederick H. Smith
Jody L. Allen
Abstract
This thesis deals with the rates and types of skeletal fractures in New York's African Burial Ground, a cemetery used by colonial Africans for most of the 18th century. In the cemetery, there is a distinct spatial arrangement, with the graves falling on both sides of a fence line. There are several interesting patterns at work here; for instance, those buried to the north of the fence line are predominately male and predominately dated to the "Late" period (1776 - close of cemetery). These factors have led researchers to hypothesize that these individuals were possibly transients, refugees coming to the city during the turmoil of the Revolutionary War. This research compares violent fractures to non-violent ones in an effort to determine the social roles and identities of these individuals.
Recommended Citation
Dutcher, Jennifer, ""A Past Rooted in Pain": Skeletal Trauma in the African Burial Ground" (2009). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 296.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/296
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.