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
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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
Posted January 1, 2018 by Kimberlee Moran
The question still remains: "Why were so many burials left behind?" As the project historian, I have been researching this question at local and national archives. According to the records of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (housed at the American Baptist Historical Society in Atlanta, Georgia), the entire burial transfer enterprise may have lasted only four months from November 21, 1859 to April 1, 1860. This is a rather short amount of time given to move burials from a cemetery... Read More
Posted December 5, 2017 by Nicholas Bonneau
Anyone who works with human remains will say that they have experienced a wide range of reactions from people when their profession becomes known. Most people find our work fascinating, but occasionally we encounter people who think our work is weird, scary, or sometimes downright offensive.
Death is an unavoidable part of being human. It is shrouded in mystery − a topic we are taught to avoid. It can conjure a sense of fear or dread as a force we do not understand and cannot... Read More
Posted October 4, 2017 by Kimberlee Moran
Salvage archaeology, sometimes called rescue archaeology, occurs when an archaeological site would otherwise be destroyed by construction or natural processes such as flooding. In these situations, archaeologists recover what they can, sometimes electing to only excavate a portion of the site. In the case of Arch Street, it was the project team's goal to rescue all human remains so that construction could continue.
In March 2017, archaeologists worked with construction workers on... Read More
Posted October 2, 2017 by Allison Grunwald