Michael Blakey is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, and American Studies at William & Mary and founding director of its Institute for Historical Biology. From 1992 to 2009 he was scientific director of the New York African Burial Ground Project. Marc Landas spoke with him as part of his reporting on the Elmhurst African Burial Ground, the burial place of the free Black community of old Newtown, now Elmhurst, Queens. In this first of two installments, Blakey describes the path that led him to Lower Manhattan, what human bones can reveal about lives the written record distorted, why the law left African American burial grounds exposed, and why the fight over them is a human rights struggle. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marc Landas: What drew you to the African Burial Ground project?

Michael Blakey: To explain what drew me to that work, I have to begin briefly with what drew me to bioarchaeology.

I’ve been doing archaeology since I became a member of the Maryland Archaeological Society at the age of 13, in the mid-’60s. I was the youngest and only Black member then. I worked at the Smithsonian when I was 15, under one of the three leading paleopathologists, Don Ortner, doing the kind of research most of my colleagues have continued to do.

I became involved in the Black Consciousness Movement in the late ’60s. At 17, I was in a study group on the Black Panther Party, reading Fanon, Du Bois, and Marx. I eventually returned to anthropology at Howard University, where Black anthropologists were creating a different vantage on the study of humankind. It was activist scholarship, consistent with most—or the best—African diasporic scholars.

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I worked with George Armelagos, a biocultural anthropologist and another of the three or so best-known paleopathologists—people who study health and disease in archaeological remains. I also worked with Johnnetta Cole, a cultural anthropologist and Black feminist, leftist anthropologist. As co-chair of my doctoral committee, she kept me close to those activist roots.

I taught at Howard, where I’d previously been a student, in the 1980s and ’90s. That’s where I received the call about the African Burial Ground. I’d been training students to interpret health, disease, and community life from skeletal remains.

The key point, as I entered the situation in New York, was that human remains might help uncover the truth about communities whose written record was incomplete or very biased. The history of the enslaved, written by white men, often defensively, was an example. My hope was that bioarchaeology could reveal more about our ancestors than written records alone. Those records are useful, but I think someone said you have to read them with a third eye, as one does bioarchaeological evidence.

I first received a call from Christopher Moore, a Black journalist in New York. They were concerned that the Black press had not been invited to an October press conference at the site about the remains. I think I had read something in The New York Times. The archaeologists had expected to uncover only 12 remains. It was interesting to me, and suspicious.

I was in the process of writing what became three books, now called The Blinding Light of Race: Race and Racism in Western Science and Society, published in 2026 by Routledge. I started it then and had to put it down because I went to New York and discovered that, indeed, there were a number of shadowy things.

I went to New York by invitation of Mayor Dinkins’s committee. Its community members met regularly with the GSA—the General Services Administration, the developers—and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C., which oversaw the law governing archaeology on such sites. Peggy King Jorde called on behalf of the mayor, asking me to assess the situation. As I came to understand it, my sense of that task was similar to theirs.

I found a situation in which the developers, the federal government, were pushing expeditiously to build their building despite public concern. They were not serious in their responses to African Americans’ desire to “stop the digging,” as they put it.

The archaeologists and forensic anthropologists on-site—contract archaeology is required under the law—were unqualified, from my point of view, to study what by then appeared to be at least 200 remains. This was several months later, I think in the spring of ’91 or ’92. Forensic anthropologists do work similar to mine, but with interesting differences. Ultimately, 419 human remains were exhumed.

For one, they knew nothing about the African American, much less African, historical context needed to interpret pathologies, age and sex, demography, and so on. These numbers mean nothing without context.

The forensic folks were used to working with a single human body, using very objectifying methods of race estimation and reporting to courts and police. As bioarchaeologists, we reconstruct a community—in this case, from hundreds of human remains—to understand its demography and epidemiology, adding evidence to cultural and historical data.

I recognized these technical problems, had a network of people who could solve them, and prepared a competing proposal. But I’m also an African American rooted in the struggle. African Americans’ needs to know their history, and their interest in the sacred meaning and dignity of memorialization, were being dismissed. Memorialization was not my job, but preserving their right to do it was.

I think then-State Senator David Paterson, with whom I met frequently, was right in his advice. We ultimately assembled the most racially diverse bioarchaeological or interdisciplinary team yet, led by African Americans and many diasporic scholars. We also saw persistent racism in our interactions with the GSA.

Senator Paterson encouraged us—this was the ’90s—not to accuse them of racism because they would begin to shut down. This was a period of backlash to antiracism, not unlike the current one at all, when merely naming racism had been conveniently construed as a kind of racism itself. We were to focus on the contract violations, which were numerous.

After a long struggle, we got the money we needed from the GSA to complete the project. Only recently have I written that story in the leading international journal Current Anthropology, examining the racism and white supremacist positioning of both the GSA and my anthropological colleagues there. You asked why I was there. I was not willing to let that slide.

Marc Landas: If I can back up a little bit, I find it fascinating that you discuss interpretations of disease. Most people would think of that purely from a medical point of view, but you’re talking about something much bigger. Can you discuss that for a little bit?

Michael Blakey: The broad understanding comes from biocultural anthropology, which studies how, for example, the political economy—the distribution of resources, money, and differences in power—affects human biology and health. It’s similar to public health, but in bioarchaeology or paleopathology, the study of ancient populations’ health, we apply it to communities of the past.

I should mention—and I’ve recently written about this in the flagship journal of anatomy—that those ideas began with African Americans. These are antithetical to social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism: the idea that our biology determines our social standing. IQ measurements, skull shapes, and all of that. This is the opposite: our social standing affects our biology.

Frederick Douglass began that idea as he began the nature-nurture debate in 1854, at the very beginning of scientific racism here in the U.S. Du Bois continued it, and people in public health have recently come to recognize that he began public health as we understand it. So this is that kind of analysis of the past.

We usually work with human skeletons and very little soft tissue. In a living person, the skeleton is living tissue, affected by the physiology of the body and by diseases. Striations on bone can result from local infection; bilateral striations represent generalized infection.

Since graduate school, I’ve developed a method for looking at defects in dental enamel development, called hypoplasia, that represent general childhood stress. You don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s malnutrition and/or disease. An adult tooth that developed in childhood can tell us the age at which those stresses occurred.

This information about health is often quite general, but it allows comparisons of physical quality of life across populations throughout human existence. The descendant community in New York wanted us to answer: What was the physical quality of life during their enslavement?

In a Smithsonian project while at Howard, I had already shown, based on the tooth data we have, that enslaved African Americans had the highest frequency of these defects ever seen in any human population. This was an 1830 Philadelphia population, largely escaped slaves who had spent their childhood under slavery. So paleopathology has advantages and disadvantages.

Marc Landas: Having worked on the African Burial Ground, what do you think needs to be understood about the window between discovery and protection—or loss, in some cases? Can you speak to that specific window where everything is happening?

Michael Blakey: The law is important. When the African Burial Ground was rediscovered, certainly by 1991, when I was there, a new law was in place: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA. It only protected Indigenous people of North America: Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Alaska Natives. They had fought for it, and I had been close by and supportive, unlike most of my colleagues. That was also part of the way I entered.

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act calls for archaeology to preserve historical data disturbed by development involving federal funds. The African Burial Ground was such a project and should have been protected. It was protected in the sense that low-bid historical archaeologists and forensic anthropologists were brought in to take data and remove remains in the way of construction.

Had the site included Native Americans, they would have had to stop, consult with descendant tribes, and negotiate. That might well have meant not excavating at all. The law gave Native people more power, though not ultimate power. They’ve enhanced it in the last couple of years, but they already had a handle on the situation.

African Americans had no such law for unmarked graves. The law might have preserved the site had the graves had headstones. Without them, it becomes an archaeological site rather than a cemetery. These are the technical matters.

Here’s the real thrust of it, I think. Developers want to develop, whether they’re federal or private. They want to build their building or their road. They don’t really care about the archaeology, much less their ethics regarding descendant communities.

In Bethesda, Maryland, African American descendants have been protesting with their white neighbors against excavation for a storage facility that may be on part of an African American Reconstruction-era cemetery. They’ve struggled for eight years because Montgomery County and its executive want to allow the development. The descendant community—this is Moses Cemetery—has taken the case to the state Supreme Court at least once. They’ve slowed it down, but development continues.

Similarly, the GSA in New York tried to develop and excavate as long as it could, until a huge public outcry invoked the right to comment under the National Historic Preservation Act. The Black community defined that as the right to stop it. They went to Capitol Hill and found support from Congressman Gus Savage, and the rest is history.

It is a struggle. I guess there are three major parties. The most powerful tend to be money-making developers, often ensconced with politicians. Then there are archaeologists, whose bread and butter comes from developers and who may not be particularly sensitive to the people whose history they study. I’ve written about that in my three volumes on The Blinding Light of Race: Race and Racism in Western Science and Society, using anthropology as a window on it.

The third are what I called “descendant communities,” a term I coined. In New York, it was African Americans who cared about that site and for whom the treatment of the site represented their dignity. So the fight was on.

Marc Landas: I’ll get to descendant communities in the next question. But you’re hinting at something I want to make explicit. The battle over burial grounds—and there are often battles—is as much a civil rights struggle as an archaeological project. When did you realize that dispute was fundamental to the process?

Michael Blakey: In Frederick Douglass’s terms, I would call it a human rights struggle. That’s technically distinct from a civil rights struggle, though it encompasses civil rights and is bigger than that.

As an anthropologist, after years of struggling with these questions, I have come to understand that the memorialization of the dead is a distinct human characteristic. It is the characteristic that marks modern Homo sapiens in the long line of the development of human traits: standing on two legs five million years ago; using tools because their hands are free; sharing food, again because the hands and legs allow them to bring food back to a base camp.

The sharing of food is essential to what makes human society and economy. Other animals largely do not do that past nursing—not that primates don’t. Then there’s the use of language, the transformation of energy through fire, and the burial of the dead, which emerges with archaic Homo sapiens for the first time. We all do something of the kind, and no other species does it.

Inspired by the first Black physical anthropologist, W. Montague Cobb, who chose different species names to make a point, I’ve chosen to call our species “the memorializer.” That’s what we are.

At the African Burial Ground, we see very careful burials representing—creating—human dignity, intruded on by trash from the surrounding 18th-century English and white American industries: pottery, a tannery.

Under the ground lies the contestation of their humanity that existed above it in this slaveholding colony and then nation. That’s my fundamental anthropological understanding of why this is a human right African Americans struggled for, against those who would deny them the full expression of their humanity and dignity.

Next: Part 2 — Descendant Communities and the Myth of Neutrality.