A scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History looks at a jaw bone. Bone, soft tissue and teeth were all studied as part of the research, CAIRO, EGYPT - OCTOBER 21: Camels and horses stand tied to a fence below the Great Pyramid of Giza on October 21, 2013 in Cairo, Egypt. The Pyramids of Giza, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and built around 2600 B.C., are one of Egypt's major tourist drawcards. After a summer of violence, tourist numbers across Egypt are at their lowest levels since a 2010 peak in tourism in the country. While Egypt's tourism sector took a dive following the popular uprising that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, occupancy rates of hotels in the capital Cairo and across Egypt have been reported as dramatically down since the Egyptian military's overthrow of President Morsi in July. In 2010, tourism represented 13% of Egypt's economy and employed one in seven of the country's workers. (Photo by Ed Giles/Getty Images). Alvin collects a sample of Lophelia pertusa from an extensive mound of both dead and live coral. An expert works to uncover one of the 20 wooden sculptures which were recently discovered at the ancient archaeological site of Chan Chan, in the outskirts of the northern city of Trujillo, in Peru, on October 22, 2018, - The unique sculptures found in niches are fixed to the ground measuring an average of 70 centimeters and representing different characters. (Photo by CRIS BOURONCLE / AFP) / The erroneous mention[s] appearing in the metadata of this photo by CRIS BOURONCLE has been modified in AFP systems in the following manner: [20] instead of [19]. Please immediately remove the erroneous mention[s] from all your online services and delete it (them) from your servers. If you have been authorized by AFP to distribute it (them) to third parties, please ensure that the same actions are carried out by them. Failure to promptly comply with these instructions will entail liability on your part for any continued or post notification usage. Therefore we thank you very much for all your attention and prompt action. We are sorry for the inconvenience this notification may cause and remain at your disposal for any further information you may require. (Photo credit should read CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP/Getty Images) Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves. The proclamation said all slaves held in states that had seceded from the United States were free. The story also corrects the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. (CNN) — Months after a Texas school district broke ground on a new technical center, archaeologists there made a surprising discovery: the long-buried remains of 95 people. The first remains were discovered in February in Sugar Land, a suburb southwest of Houston. And now officials have learned who these people probably were – freed black people forced to work in convict labor camps. For over a century, these graves were underground and untouched. But the finding that they likely held the remains of slaves, which researchers announced Monday, highlights an era that’s largely forgotten in history – a time when slavery was illegal, but many blacks were essentially still enslaved. The Sugar Land property is owned by the Fort Bend Independent School District, which is building its new technical school on the land. “It’s a remarkable opportunity for our community and our school district to learn much more about the history of our local region,” Superintendent Charles Dupre said in a statement. The site’s archaeological project manager agrees. “It’s a rare opportunity,” Reign Clark of Goshawk Environmental Consulting told CNN. “We’ll be telling the story of what it was like to live here, work here, and, in some cases, die here.” How they were found It started with a hunch. Reginald Moore took an interest in historical cemeteries after working as a Texas state prison guard in the 1980s. He no longer works at the prison, but he’s still a community activist. One of his main focuses: getting people to recognize the abuses of the Sugar Land convict-leasing system, in which prison inmates were forced into labor. “I felt like I had the duty to be an advocate for them and to speak from the grave for these people,” Moore told CNN. Fort Bend Independent School District Researchers' drawings of the remains. The slaves were overworked and malnourished. Moore is the caretaker of another cemetery in Fort Bend County: the Imperial Farm Cemetery, which is nestled behind a shopping center off the highway. Near the cemetery is the home of the school district’s new James Reese Career and Technical Center. So when construction on the Sugar Land school’s center started last fall, Moore told officials that other cemeteries might be nearby. “He has documented and provided a lot of information about the history of that cemetery. He has a lot of ideas where the burials could’ve been,” said Chris Florance of the Texas Historical Commission, which has played an advisory role in the project. What they found The bodies were each buried in individual wooden caskets. Of those analyzed so far, all but one are men. Researchers say they could have been as young as 14 and as old as 70. They were probably buried between 1878 and 1910, Clark said. Despite the passage of time, researchers can tell that the workers were malnourished or sick and faced huge physical stress when they were alive. Clark said there’s lots of evidence that they were doing very heavy labor that, for some, began at a young age. “We can tell from the state of the bone and muscle attachment features that these were heavily built individuals. Some bones were misshapen by the sheer musculature and labor,” Clark told CNN. It’s no surprise in Texas Moore wasn’t the only one who wasn’t shocked at the discovery. Florance said his commission took a role in the project knowing a find like this could happen. “It’s not uncommon in Texas,” he told CNN. What was shocking, though, was how hard the graves were to find. The commission had done assessments before construction began, Florance said, but the land was so altered over the years that it was hard to know anything would be there. “One of the biggest problems with old cemeteries is that the markers might have gone away. There’s no surface evidence,” he said. The are 177 cemeteries in Fort Bend County, but there could be as many as 50,000 cemeteries across the state. Only 1,706 have a historic Texas cemetery designation. The ‘Hellhole on the Brazos’ President Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation said all slaves who lived in states that had seceded from the US were free. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, formally abolished slavery in all of the US. That doesn’t mean forced labor didn’t continue. After the Civil War ended in 1865 and slaves were outlawed, the Texas economy dropped into a deep depression. Businesses needed a new form of cheap labor. So they resorted to prisons. The convict-leasing system was essentially slavery all over again. Prisoners were taken from state prisons and leased to private businesspeople who worked the laborers as hard as they could for the cheapest price. And the less food, water and shelter these workers got, the less they cost. “One 14-year-old was 6 feet tall,” Clark told CNN. “This population was hand-selected.” Sugar Land’s economy had thrived on sugar cane plantations, which largely relied on slave labor. So two Confederate veterans, Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ellis, signed a contract with the state in 1878 to lease the state’s prison population. Conditions were so bad that the city got itself a nickname: “Hellhole on the Brazos.” “It had the worst reputation of all the prison farms in Texas,” sociologist Richard Vogel told CNN affiliate KTRK. What happens next Digging up and analyzing all 95 graves takes serious time – likely more than nine months’ worth of work. Each unburial takes up to two days, plus up to eight hours of cleaning and up to 15 hours for analysis, the school district said.<doc-sep>Today the city of Sugar Land is a sprawling suburb southwest of Houston, home to Imperial Sugar Co., shopping malls and endless cul-de-sacs. But more than a century ago, it was a sprawling network of sugar cane plantations and prison camps. Sugar Land was better known then as the Hellhole on the Brazos. From sunup to sundown, convicts who were leased by the state to plantation owners toiled in the fields chopping sugar cane sometimes until they “dropped dead in their tracks,” as the State Convention of Colored Men of Texas complained in 1883.<doc-sep>The remains of dozens of people found at a construction site in Texas this year are most likely those of African-Americans who were forced to work on a plantation there around the turn of the 20th century, officials said this week. That finding, announced Monday, opens a window onto a little-remembered period in which black people in certain Southern states were essentially treated like slaves post-emancipation. The remains of about 95 people were discovered early this year on a construction site outside Houston, where the Fort Bend Independent School District is building a new school, according to school district officials and court records. This week, archaeologists announced that the bones were most likely those of African-American laborers who worked as part of the so-called convict lease system, in which the state of Texas outsourced prisoners to work and live on plantations. The researchers estimated that the cemetery, which was on the plantation’s grounds, was used from 1878 to 1911.<doc-sep>
A school district in Texas unearthed a long-forgotten cemetery, during a construction project, which archaeologists now believe contains the bodies of black forced-labor prisoners. The remains of 95 people were discovered in February in the city Sugar Land, just southwest of Houston. This week, researchers announced the bodies likely belonged to black people who were working in forced-labor camps, at a moment in history, between 1878 and 1910, when slavery had already been abolished. The discovery was made when the Fort Bend Independent School District broke ground for a new technical center. "I think it's a remarkable opportunity for our community and our school district to learn much more about the history of our local region," superintendent of schools Charles Dupre said in a statement to Newsweek. Archaeologists provide update on historic cemetery found at Fort Bend ISD’s James Reese Career and Technical Center site. MORE: https://t.co/N2OOu6bdFt pic.twitter.com/ONX7cGYdZn — Fort Bend ISD 🍁 (@FortBendISD) July 17, 2018 "There are so many things we know about our history, and this is just going to add value and extend the knowledge base about Fort Bend County and Sugar Land, Texas," he added. A team of researchers from three universities gathered to start the delicate process of removing the bodies. The scientists must spend at least 36 hours per grave to remove each body, followed by four to eight hours to clean the remains and up to 15 hours for analysis. Of the bodies that have been analyzed so far, all are male, except for one female, Catrina Whitley, bioarchaeologist and lead anthropologist at the site, said in a statement Historians say there are many more slave cemeteries hidden throughout the country, under parking lots and on church grounds. The finding of this latest burial ground comes not long after a similar case that unearthed hundreds of bodies under an abandoned baseball field in Tennessee. The people buried there were also thought to be slaves. Sites like these are slowly being uncovered. Michael Blakey, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and director of the Institute of Historical Biology, told USA Today that this findings like these should be honored. "It belongs to us as citizens, and there's a need to memorialize," he said. "The history of African-Americans in this country has been distorted and omitted."