“How are things going with the project?” “What have you guys been up to?” These are questions that I get asked a lot. The answer is: washing.
The last coffin was internally excavated on January 2, 2018 meaning that since then, all the skeletal material is now a collection of bones in boxes. Before any analysis can be done, all those bones have to be cleaned. Why? So we can really “see” all the features and marks on the bones that help us determine things like sex, age... Read More
Back in March of 2017 when coffins were being excavated from the First Baptist Church’s cemetery on 218 Arch Street, we had a problem: where to put the coffins. At the time, the property developer took them from the site and stored them in shipping containers. But this was not a long-term solution. Neither could we internally excavate the remains in that sort of facility. After a few false starts, a solution emerged: Rutgers-Camden would provide funding for an off-campus warehouse from... Read More
On April 28, 2018, several Arch Street Project members hosted tables at the annual Rutgers Day (on their Camden campus), an event where individual departments offer "free exhibits, hands-on activities, lectures, demonstrations, children’s programs and more, aimed at the general public, parents and children, teens, current and prospective students, and alumni." [1] At our booth, the ASP team set up an educational video about the project... Read More
On Friday, April 13th, 2018, members of the Arch Street Project team presented their preliminary research in a symposium at the 83rd annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Washington, D.C. Participating team members and collaborators included Kimberlee Moran, Doug Mooney, Cory Kegerise, Nicholas Bonneau, George Leader, Gerald Conlogue,... Read More
During the Fall Semester (Sept - Dec 2017), Kimberlee Moran ran a "Bones and Bioarchaeology" class at Rutgers-Camden to connect students to the Arch Street project. Over 14 weeks students learned archaeological and anthropological basics within the context of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia's cemetery. Students helped to clean and assess some of the remains at Rutgers-Camden and helped to organize material culture and human remains at our off-campus facility. As a final... Read More
