MARYLAND Archaeologist makes unexpected discovery on the Eastern Shore

What appeared to be an African skull was found in a white cemetery.
WASHINGTON POST
At the bottom of grave B-7, where the autumn's afternoon light was rapidly fading, Doug Owsley looked puzzled as he gently ran his hand over the young woman's skull.
All day, as he and his crew of experts crouched in the dusty graves of the remote, unmarked cemetery on Maryland's Eastern Shore, something had been bothering the Smithsonian anthropologist.
The site, a mysterious mound in the swampy Talbot County tidal flats, seemed to have the earmarks of a lost 17th-century European cemetery: the small boulders used as tombstones, the east-west orientation of the bodies, the old, hexagonal "toe-pincher" coffin styles.
But Owsley had seen signs of the unexpected here. Now, after scrutinizing B-7, whose skeleton was still squeezed into the crumbling wooden sides of her coffin, he quietly announced to the others that her skull didn't look European. "It looks African," he said.
The discovery came near the end of a three-week dig, which concluded last week, that was designed to educate local high school students and net the Smithsonian the bones of some of Maryland's earliest settlers for scientific study.
What he expected
Owsley, of the National Museum of Natural History, expected the bones to be those of Europeans right off the boat, the first bold immigrants who gambled their lives and fortunes in the hostile Chesapeake wilderness and became among the earliest Americans. "I think they're going to date somewhere between 1650 and 1680," he said.
He planned to study the bones for nutrition and disease and fill in the portrait of Maryland's first settlers in conjunction with the 400th anniversary of the 1607 Jamestown settlement in Virginia. Instead, he stumbled upon an intriguing surprise. "It really threw me," he said later. "I wasn't expecting it at all."
Why were people who looked to be African buried in what appeared to be a 17th-century European cemetery?
There were then very few blacks on the Eastern Shore, perhaps only about 300 in 1665, according to one history of slavery in the period. Did these burials date from a later time?
Others buried in the mound seemed to have European features. Perhaps the cemetery did date from the 1600s, and the earliest days of slavery, when white indentured servants and black slaves were not yet so segregated and might have been buried together in such a lowly spot. Perhaps these early Marylanders were white and black.
"That would fit with what we know about the 17th-century Eastern Shore," University of Maryland historian Ira Berlin said. "Poor people caught in some kind of unfree relationship, whether slavery or various kinds of indentureships, lived together, drank together, slept together, and that they're buried together may not be that surprising."
The cemetery first was investigated about 11/2 years ago, when its owner called archaeologist Darrin Lowery and reported that his property contained a American Indian burial mound.
Lowery, executive director of the Chesapeake Watershed Archaeological Research Foundation in Easton, Md., knew no such burial mounds existed in the area but agreed to investigate anyway.
Unusual rocks
Lowery said in recent interviews that when he inspected the mound, which rises between the creek and a marsh, he noted that it was aeolian, made of fine, windblown soil. He also noticed strange rocks scattered across its crest.
They weren't part of a building foundation. Nor were they plow stones unearthed from a farm field. But Lowery had seen them before in very old cemeteries: primitive grave markers placed by early colonists who lacked the tools and materials to make a proper tombstone.
When Lowery and a soil scientist friend bored into the ground later, they came up with strikingly well-preserved human bone.
"Guess what?" Lowery said he told the landowner. "You've got a 17th-century cemetery."
Owsley, 53, one of the nation's top forensic anthropologists, was eager to learn more about the region's unheralded first colonists. By studying their bones, he could tell much about what they ate, what ailed them, how they lived and how they died.