ack to the 1820s lies beneath layers of dirt.
In June, those archaeologists from Temple University in Philadelphia began unraveling Timbuctoo'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 medicines 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. (Archaeologists 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, pursued a geophysical survey did the excavation begin.)
"It is very important that these excavations take place," said Rex Ellis, associate director of curatorial 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 contributors 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; evidence of integration, not just segregation. They are, they say, unearthing evidence not only of lives endured in slavery, but also of whole communities of escaped slaves hiding in small, self-sufficient communities.
"Historical records are biased and written from a certain perspective. People we are working with haven't had control over the narrative of the past," said Paul Shackel, professor of anthropology 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 archaeologists are asking descendents and communities what they want to know. This practice spread after the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation, which required archaeologists to repatriate human burial and funerary objects, prompting consultation with descendents, Shackel said. A Temple student working with Orr is conducting interviews with Timbuctoo descendents to help guide the dig.
Christopher Fennell, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, says communities 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 Americans like Timbuctoo." Researchers are focusing, for example, on how blacks participated in the Underground Railroad. "The untold story," Fennell says, "is that it was really run by free and enslaved African Americans helping slaves to escape."