How should a universal history of ruins address the study of contemporary landscapes “ruined” by structural racism, displacement, dumping, and vandalism? Like many other historic African American cemeteries and burial grounds of enslaved people, Geer Cemetery was hidden in plain sight for decades in an overgrown wooded area in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Yet the cemetery was never forgotten by the descendant community, and since the mid-1980s has been the home of sporadic efforts to reclaim the space and rediscover its history — a history bound up with the founding and most important institutions in Durham. This paper explores the political and ethical implications of labeling these spaces as ruins, and the work of family members, volunteers, college students, anthropologists, and archaeologists who insist on marking, documenting, and unruining these places of the dead. The authors are members of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory, a multi-university, multi-cemetery partnership.
Bios
Alicia Jiménez is assistant professor of classical studies at Duke University. Her research engages with archaeological theory and the material traces of Roman imperialism between 218 BCE and 100 CE. Her book, Imagines Hibridae: una aproximación postcolonialista al estudio de las necrópolis de la Bética [A Postcolonial Approach to the Study of the Baetican Necropolis] (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2008), analyzes the impact of Roman colonization in the funerary rituals of southern Spain and how different discourses about collective ancestry were simultaneously mediated in the forum and the tomb.
She is the PI of Duke’s excavation project at the Roman army camps near Numantia (Renieblas, Spain, 2nd–1st c. BCE), one of the oldest Roman camps in the Mediterranean and a key site to understand the role of the army in the creation of the first Roman provinces. She has been visiting Durham’s cemeteries with her course “The Archaeology of Death” since 2015 and is a cofounder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory.
Adam Rosenblatt is associate professor of the practice in international comparative studies at Duke University. He is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015), and has written extensively about mass graves, forensic science, and movements to care for the marginalized dead. His second book, Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming Buried Pasts to Revise the Present, will be out in 2023. He is the cofounder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory and a member of the Friends of Geer Cemetery.