Cemetery Survey

From the 17th to 21st century, the Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground at Sylvester Manor has been a sacred space for the people of color connected to the manor. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, both the black and indigenous communities with ties to the manor have used the cemetery as place to memorialize their loved ones. Even those who left the manor and Shelter Island completely often requested to be taken back and buried there upon their deaths. The fact of this longstanding practice is evidence for the immense cultural significance of the burial ground to the manor’s present and past communities of color.  

Today the cemetery is covered in pine forest, but that is a recent alteration to the landscape. Prior to the early 20th century, the burial ground would have appeared as an open field, “nestled behind a small knoll under the shade of a century old oak (Woltz 2020)." It is in this past landscape that free and enslaved black inhabitants of Sylvester Manor and the surrounding area returned to again and again to bury and remember their dead. This was probably also the state of the landscape when the cemetery was first established by the enslaved Africans brought to Shelter Island in the late 17th century. By establishing their own place of memorialization, the enslaved community at Sylvester Manor left their mark both on the landscape and the cultural memory of Sylvester Manor. For this reason, the continued study of the Afro-Indigenous Cemetery and its past landscape is an essential part of illuminating the lives and experiences of the manor's earliest black inhabitants and their descendants.

In the Fall of 2024, students and faculty from the Historical Archaeology master’s program at UMB completed a preliminary survey using geophysical methods in the area of the Afro-Indigenous Burial ground at Sylvester Manor. This survey aimed to accomplish three things to help establish the approximate number of burials and the extent of the burial ground, expanding what Sylvester Manor already knows based on physical and documentary evidence. The technique that was used is ground penetrating radar (GPR) which uses radar waves to map the location of the burials without disturbing the ground. The main questions that this survey aimed to answer were: What is the extent of the burial ground and how many people are buried there? As well as, whether there are additional burials located down the hill from the currently understood edges of this space. 

Gaining a better understanding of the landscape of the Afro-Indigenous burial ground helps us to connect documentary evidence that details who is buried here, with physical data of the number of graves and distribution of these within and outside of this space. This information will help us to continue to better forefront and understand the lives of those who are buried here. The process of this survey also included the participation of descendants of those who are buried here as part of our aim to establish community outreach and collaboration throughout this project.