The first two installments of this conversation moved from theory to ground truth — from Dr. Aja Lans’s framework for reading a skeleton to the specific, physical history of the Harlem African Burial Ground itself. This final installment steps back out to the harder questions underneath all of it: once a burial ground is found, once the bones are inventoried, who actually gets to decide what happens next? Lans’s answer runs directly against the assumption built into most preservation law — that only a documented, traceable descendant has real standing to speak for the dead — and toward something closer to a “referent population,” people who share kinship with the ancestors buried there whether or not a paper trail connects them. The conversation moves from there into the deliberate erasure built into the archive itself: what funerary practices looked like for free Black New Yorkers who were rarely allowed to leave a permanent marker, and why women’s presence in that history is so much harder to document than men’s, even when their labor and organizing held the community together.

It’s a fitting note to end on because it names the exact problem this research keeps running into. There’s no tidy, unbroken line of documented descendants connecting anyone alive today to the people buried at the Elmhurst African Burial Ground — which is precisely the condition Lans argues shouldn’t disqualify a community from claiming and caring for its dead. Her account of “defending the dead” without waiting for genealogical proof, and her insistence that the absence of women from the written record is a function of who was allowed to write, not who was actually there, are both arguments this project has had to make on its own terms, about its own archive. This conversation doesn’t just inform that work — it’s an articulation of the case for it.

Marc Landas: Who has standing to speak for a buried community when there are no direct descendants left?

Aja Lans: Excellent question. I’d argue the fixation on lineal descent and biological kinship is something of a straw man — it prioritizes a Western, positivist notion of kinship, and makes it easy to say “no one is alive to speak for them.” I encounter this constantly in museums: “they don’t have a documented descendant, what if we give the remains to the wrong person?” It becomes a justification for inaction, or for simply disregarding the ancestors.

I love the work of Jovan Scott Lewis — a geographer at Berkeley, since anthropology can be pretty awful. He worked with California on reparations, and in a piece called “Political Geography” argues that one way to define blackness in the United States is through the “rending of relationship” — because that’s what chattel slavery was designed to do: strip people from their kinship networks and prevent lines of descent, quite intentionally. That struck me because, applied to repatriation of human remains, it means the frameworks we’re trained to use for kinship and lineage will structurally never work for black people — and I’d argue that’s by design. It’s part of why Dr. Blakey has always emphasized the descendant-community approach.

My friend and collaborator Jen Wu, in her work with sex workers, proposes “ethical stakeholders” — the modern-day referent population for whoever you’re working with. For me, at this burial ground, that’s the modern-day people of East Harlem who share kinship with these ancestors. With black cemeteries specifically, churches often make this easier, since there’s already a descendant congregation caring for and speaking for the site. I think about this through Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake — who’s mourning them, who’s caring for them — drawing on the idea of “defending the dead” from the Zong case. It comes down to who’s recognizing these ancestors as human and doing right by them — whether that means cremation, reburial, whatever it is — and to the people actually impacted, who could be helped or harmed, by that work.

This connects to my broader approach. If I encounter an ancestor who was incarcerated and leave that fact sitting there without addressing the history of incarceration or the prison-industrial complex, that just feeds the myth that black people have “always been criminals.” I try to think: who could be harmed by how I present this? People also underestimate how much historical research and archaeology get manipulated for political ends — you see it constantly without registering it. In conflict, sites are often among the first things destroyed, because destroying a site destroys a claim to a place. There are white nationalist movements in this country that specifically comb through archaeological findings to build their arguments.

That was one of the big controversies around Kennewick Man — a facial reconstruction some people seized on to claim he looked “white,” and therefore that white people were “here first.” Something similar happens now with claims about ancient lactose tolerance — mining findings for a preexisting agenda. As Randall McGuire says, archaeology is political, and we have to think about who could be implicated by the research we put into the world.

Marc Landas: What were funerary practices like for free black New Yorkers in the early-to-mid 19th century, if we want to get specific?

Aja Lans: That depends a lot on region. Starting with New York: burial practices were legally restricted for quite a while — there were even laws limiting funerals to no more than ten black attendees. So one issue in looking at African diaspora burial practices generally is the gap between what people were legally permitted to do and what they wanted to do. I’m most familiar with colonial New England, since I worked on a site in Massachusetts, but we can think more broadly too.

There are trends in how people thought cemeteries should be used, and then there’s the practical matter of cost — gravestones were expensive. Poorer black populations were more likely to use perishable materials: a wooden cross, if Christian, or — at least in New England, and probably elsewhere — seashells, or field stones that just looked like ordinary stone. These markers could be moved and weren’t permanent, so someone could later claim there was never anything there. It was likely more portable, temporary markers than fixed monuments. The other issue is cost again: many people wouldn’t have had coffins at all, likely using shrouds instead — which is why for some remains I’ll note “there’s a shroud pin stain,” something we see archaeologically.

What I find really interesting is looking at contemporary black cemeteries, where I think we’re still seeing echoes of these older practices. When I moved to Baltimore, it was life-changing to discover Mount Auburn Cemetery still exists there, because Sharp Street Church never lost ownership of the land — a proper cemetery where free black people with some means invested in headstones. But some of the more recent markers use all sorts of materials — plastic toys, artificial flowers, a hand-carved cross — and I think we can imagine that kind of improvised memorialization happening in the past too.

Marc Landas: What about preparation of the body clothing-wise?

Aja Lans: I’m most familiar with shrouds. We sometimes find small pieces of fabric on remains, but I’m not positive about clothing specifically. People were also very impoverished, so I honestly don’t know what someone would necessarily have been buried in — I’d assume a set of clothes, but—this is the thing — we often find buttons with burials. In some colonial Virginia burials of wealthier white people, you find evidence of dyed garments preserved as staining on the bones. I haven’t seen that with any of these ancestors, but there’s definitely evidence of shrouds at minimum.

Marc Landas: A newspaper article written by James Pennington, the abolitionist, about the church in Newtown where he was pastor describes the women of the community gathering and organizing a fundraiser. And that reminds me — we don’t see many black women in abolitionist narratives. You get Harriet Tubman but that’s about it. But you don’t see many black women’s footprints in the broader narrative.

Aja Lans: Mary Ellen Pleasant was the black woman who funded an abolitionist school. It’s a good example of a broader pattern: a lot of the earliest mainstream academic studies were focused simply on establishing that black women were present historically. That’s a core point of black feminist scholarship — it’s genuinely hard to find black women in what we’d consider scholarly, “reputable” sources, because black women were often prevented from documenting their own histories in those forms. To tell black women’s history accurately, we have to think more broadly about sources — reading between the lines, but also recognizing other forms of knowledge production, like art and creative writing, as legitimate traces of black women’s presence. Sometimes it’s a mention in a court proceeding or legal document — that’s often how you piece it together, because black women were integral to the abolitionist movement and frequently written out of it.

It’s genuinely frustrating — I’ll often get asked “citation?” and think, no, I’m citing myself, our community’s own knowledge. That’s part of why black communities, and black studies as a field, are needed in these spaces.

Marc Landas: That reminds me of how women got written out of the history of the early Christian Church as well. Which brings me to this question: Did black men go along with that same reduction of women in the narrative?

Aja Lans: That goes right to the roots of black feminism — the first black women’s studies reader ever published was titled All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. That title says it all, and it connects to what Alice Walker historically called “womanism.” Look at abolition, or voting rights — black women are consistently sidelined whenever it’s convenient. That’s the history of first- and second-wave feminism, and I’d argue some of third-wave too.

The book has that title because these early studies, especially in the 1980s, were addressing exactly this: women’s history in the United States is always about white women; black history is always about men. Where are the black women? This connects to the black power movement too — many black women felt torn, pressured to prioritize blackness even when it was shaped by men who held largely misogynist views, because “blackness” was framed as more important than the “feminine” part of their identity. That tension is part of why intersectionality emerged, acknowledging that both are real parts of identity — though it plays out differently depending on person and context.

More people are exploring the role black women actually played in civil rights and abolition now, but it opens into larger conversations about patriarchy, and what kind of equality we’re actually aiming for. Because if the goal is simply assimilation into a white patriarchal society, then yes — the women get left behind. But that’s a much bigger conversation.