This research is vital to acknowledging, protecting and preserving the burial sites of indigenous and enslaved peoples as well as other cultural and historically significant communities (such as historic African American communities). Understanding the location and mapping these sites will allow the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) to plan and design projects that mitigate or eliminate impacts to these important cultural resources. This will allow NCDOT to engage with local communities associated with burial sites in advance and develop projects that avoid burial site impacts and strengthen community relations. A reduction of unanticipated burial sites not only serves to protect these sites, it also saves the NCDOT from lengthy and costly delays associated with discovering a burial site during construction.
This project has a high level of urgency, as local communities and archaeology experts are concerned that rapid development and increased storm events will impact these sites if they are not documented soon. Having a comprehensive geospatial data set that includes site locations, cultural significance, and allows for sites to be easily added to the dataset is vital to ensuring the burial sites of indigenous and enslaved peoples are acknowledged and protected. This project will expand upon existing NCDOT and Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) mapping and datasets by providing a methodology to capture the cultural and historical significance of burial sites, use-community driven approaches to identifying new sites, employ a field verification process, and highlight opportunities to embed these approaches into existing NCDOT project planning and development processes.
Beyond expanding a mapping dataset for cemeteries and burial sites, the project team will develop a community engagement methodology to allow community members to participate in the identification of unmapped burial sites and inform the historical and cultural significance of sites. Using a county-level project study area (to be established through conversations with the NCDOT steering committee and research team) this project will yield a proof of concept and a community participation roadmap for engaging communities around the state in an effort to map previously unmapped cemetery and burial sites, with a focus on indigenous and enslaved peoples and culturally historic community cemeteries.
