BU researcher Andreana Cunningham is an expert on bioarchaeology, the study of human burial context: “The experiences that you go through can be marked on your body, literally,” she says.

Bioarchaeology

The Histories of Enslaved People Were Written by Slavers. A BU Researcher Is Working to Change That

Andreana Cunningham combines bioarchaeology, African diaspora studies, and archival research to better understand the lives of enslaved people

In the mid to late 1800s, the remote British overseas territory of Saint Helena was home to a community of “liberated Africans”—enslaved people from ships intercepted during the British Royal Navy’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and rerouted to the small island about 1,000 miles off the coast of Southern Africa. 

Nearly a third of the African people who landed on Saint Helena died soon thereafter, the result of mistreatment on board the slavers’ ships. They were buried in an area at the northern edge of the island, where their remains lay undisturbed until 2006, when workers began to build an airport access road. A team of archaeologists was called in to assess the extent of the gravesite and, after two and a half months, more than 300 complete skeletons were exhumed—a mere fraction of those buried in the area—and the road moved elsewhere. 

The excavated remains were held in storage and made available for a limited number of research projects—including one by Andreana Cunningham, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of archaeology, anthropology, and African American and Black diaspora studies.

Cunningham was curious about diaspora communities that formed during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Who was moved, and to where? How did those origins help shape (or not) the identities of African descendents in the Caribbean, or South Atlantic regions, or communities along the Indian Ocean? 

An expert in bioarchaeology—the archaeological study of human burial context—Cunningham pulls from a range of disciplines to piece together evidence of how enslaved people lived their lives and how they carved out autonomy in an otherwise inhumane system. She describes her work as filling in the gaps left behind by the myriad ways enslaved people were stripped of their own stories. 

“I try to address some of these gaps by combining different ways of understanding both the bodies and agency of enslaved people,” she says, “in order to better understand the ways they move through their respective landscapes, and the diversity that exists within those spaces.” 

In April 2022, Cunningham arrived on Saint Helena to take 3D scans of the exhumed skulls. Cranial shape patterns, she says, can be used in some ways as proxies for genetic data, and so the scans offer a noninvasive way to identify where, broadly, a person came from. Cunningham also analyzed archival newspapers for clues about the people buried at each of these sites. 

She compared that data to similar data she collected at the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground in Barbados, and the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, to identify how people were moved across different sites along common slave trade routes. 

What she found was a much greater influence of southeastern African populations—Mozambique, in particular—among existing African diaspora populations along the Atlantic than researchers previously thought, based on (incomplete or otherwise obscured) migration logs by enslavers. This showed that a larger swath of African communities were captured in the slave trade than enslavers ever cared to record.

Cunningham gained something else during this research, though. She reckoned with long-standing archaeological practices, and pushed herself to better engage the communities who have real, ancestral claims over these burial sites. For the research project at Saint Helena, that meant scrapping her original research plan to rebuild a more ethical version, a process that spurred new research interests going forward. 

History That’s Bone-Deep

When Cunningham was an undergraduate student at the University of Miami, she landed an internship at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where she learned that our bones hold the stories of our lives—even centuries after our deaths. 

“The skeletons of the past can actually tell us a lot about the history of the individual they belong to,” Cunningham says. “The experiences that you go through can be marked on your body, literally. Things like stress, daily habits, nutrition, the places you come from—these are all things that can be recorded, to some extent, on your skeletal remains. So, even if you are just left with bones, there are still ways that you can understand what that person was like.”

Cunningham wasn’t specifically searching for these traces of information when she conducted her research on Saint Helena, but found some nonetheless. She was particularly struck by how young the population was—more than half of the people buried at the site were under 18, based on their patterns of bone fusion and dental eruption. It was a reminder, she says, “of how fleeting life could be in this environment.”

The broad insight was a kind of lightning-rod moment for Cunningham, who was already interested in exploring ways to fill the gaps in the history of the slave trade—a history nearly universally recorded by enslavers that left little to no room for the stories and experiences of the enslaved people themselves. 

“​​That felt like a really interesting way to approach understanding the past, and learning more about slave trade history and about Afro-descendants more broadly. And I think that especially appealed to me, as an Afro-descendant, as well. It felt like a way of being able to give voice to people who could no longer share their stories,” she says. 

Cunningham went on to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Florida, where she started the work on Saint Helena. Although her view on working with human remains has grown more nuanced and complex since those early days at the Smithsonian, the bedrock of her research remains the same: What can the people enslaved by this horrific trade tell us about the experience, even now? How do those stories, omitted from the history books, change how we might think about existing diaspora communities? And how do we explore and lift up those stories while respecting the people whose remains we’re studying?

A Reckoning within Archaeology

Typically, to do a study of human remains, a researcher will submit a proposal to gain access to certain collections held by other research institutes. That proposal will outline the justification for the researcher’s work, the methods they’ll employ, any funders that have signed on—fairly cut-and-dried stuff between a researcher and an institution or organization. 

But since 2020, “the year of racial reckoning,” as Cunningham describes it, there’s been a major shift within the field of anthropology at large. “There have always been dissenters in our discipline advocating for us to do better, but 2020 was what pushed the rest of the field to follow suit,” Cunningham says. For African diaspora studies in particular, Black anthropologists have been prominent advocates for more ethical, community-grounded practice. 

“There were people pushing for accountability from institutions—reasonably so—and putting pressure to grapple with the fact that they have a lot of skeletons in their collections that have dubious origins,” Cunningham says. “People that did not consent to be there, [remains that were] sometimes victims of grave robbing, and so on. And disproportionately, in those collections, you have the skeletons of indigenous and Black people.”

That reckoning changed how Cunningham thought about the care she and others in her field were taking with the remains they studied. 

“Up until that point, I think the way that care was framed in doing work with human remains was that you are respecting them by attempting to speak to their experiences that they can’t anymore. And you’re respectful by treating them carefully, and making sure that they stay intact, and that you’re not sharing the pictures online—things of that nature.”

But as those discussions in 2020 unfolded, Cunningham says she developed a distinct discomfort with her ongoing dissertation work—work that was, by all accounts, by the book. She began questioning whether she was doing right by the people whose remains she studied.

A mentor posed a simple two-question test that Cunningham could use: “Whether my work was shedding valuable insight on the Black experience, and whether it was something I can essentially live with and sit with,” she recalls. The way her research was set up originally, Cunningham’s answer to the second question was, “no.” 

“Even though I was carrying out the project in a way that I thought was careful, I felt like it needed an overhaul,” she says. So, she started over. She struck some of the data she’d already collected, and decided that certain research collections weren’t appropriate to use at all. 

Cunningham created a whole new framework for her research that she’s grateful for today. 

“Any sort of burial work, especially in an African diaspora context, should be done with community,” she says. “I now see it as ancestor work to do any sort of work related to burial grounds. And to do that—that’s something that has to be grounded beyond a discipline.”

Historians, community advocates, communities with real or symbolic ancestors buried at these sites—these are all groups that need to be brought into any research context involving those remains, Cunningham says. She reorganized her project to incorporate all these people, and was in constant contact with many representatives of these various groups before she even left for Saint Helena, for example. 

She made all her findings as accessible as possible to anyone who might be interested in them, and would like to help to create a formal memorial and information center for the burial site. In 2022, just after Cunningham’s visit to Saint Helena, the exhumed remains were reburied. 

Turning the Spotlight on BU

Now, she’s taking these experiences and applying them to the often dubious origins of human remains at other research collections, as well—including those at BU. 

Cunningham is working with Samantha Kelley, the laboratory coordinator in the BU anthropology department, to trace back the acquisition of human remains that are part of the University’s teaching collection. 

The project is still in its very earliest stages, but broadly, Kelley says, “We’re hoping to bring BU into the 21st century, and really modernize our curation practices to make them more ethical and moral in the long run.”

Working with students, Cunningham and Kelley’s goal is a complete overhaul of the curation and documentation practices as they relate to the skeletal remains within BU’s care. It may turn out that some pieces need to be repatriated and reburied, or otherwise transitioned out of use from the teaching collection. Those decisions aren’t always clear-cut, Cunningham says; the process can be messy. But it’s an essential one for anyone in the fields of anthropology and archaeology. 

For Cunningham, it’s also an opportunity to align her work with her values. 

“It’s very much within the vein of placing ethics, ethical curation, and community at the heart of considering what research and teaching should look like,” she says. 

Cunningham’s research at Saint Helena and South Africa was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation.