Origins of an Unmarked Georgia Cemetery Using Ancient DNA Analysis

Determining the origins of those buried within undocumented cemeteries is of incredible importance to historical archaeologists and in many cases, the nearby communities.In the case of Avondale Burial Place, a cemetery in Bibb County, Georgia, in use from 1820 to 1950, all written documentation of those interred within it has been lost.Osteological and archaeological evidence alone could not describe, with confidence, the ancestral origins of the 101 individuals buried there.In the present study, we utilize ancient DNA extraction methods to investigate the origins of Avondale Burial Place through the use of well-preserved skeletal fragments from 20 individuals buried in the cemetery.Through examination of hypervariable region I in the mitochondrial genome (HVR1, mtDNA), we determine haplotypes for all 20 of these individuals.A total of 18 of the 20 individuals belong to the L or U haplogroups, suggesting that Avondale Burial Place was most likely used primarily as a resting place for African Americans.After the surrounding Bibb County community expressed interest in investigating potential ancestral relationships to those within the cemetery, a total of eight potential descendants provided saliva in order to obtain mtDNA HVR1 information.This phase of the study revealed that two different individuals from Avondale Burial Place matched two individuals with oral history ties to the cemetery.Using the online tool EMPOP, we calculated the likelihood of these exact matches occurring by chance alone (<1%).The present findings exhibit the importance of genetic analysis of cemetery origins when archaeological and Pre-print version.Visit http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiolafter official publication to acquire the final version osteological data are inconclusive for estimating ancestry of anonymous historical individuals.Avondale Burial Place was unearthed in 2008 during a road expansion in Bibb County, Georgia (Figure 1).New South Associates (NSA) under contract with the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) uncovered 101 human burials but no grave markers of any kind (Matternes et al., 2012).An initial challenge was determining what community was responsible for its construction and then linking the cemetery to the appropriate community.Historical reviews of communities present in southern Bibb County during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were conducted by both the GDOT and NSA (Matternes et al. 2012).The cemetery was not tied to any church, burial society, or other known bodies, nor did it seem to be affiliated with any nineteenth or twentieth century landowners.A review of census records indicated that historically there had always been an African-American presence in the area; however the burial sites for many of these enclaves remained unknown.There were no maps or other records of the cemetery and the lack of headstones hampered identification of specific decedents within the facility.The cemetery's position in the landscape, in an unusable corner of an agricultural field, adjacent to a wetlands area, and away from habitation complexes, was similar to places commonly employed by African-American communities (Martin 2010; Matternes and Richey 2014; Matternes and Smith 2014).While many nineteenth and twentieth century communities viewed the cemetery as a means of social expression to the world at large, many African-American communities perceived burial grounds as private, family-oriented facilities and placed them in the discreet, out of public view locations (Honerkamp and Crook Jr. 2012;Parsons 1923;Sloane 1991).GDOT and NSA investigations suggested that the burial ground was used by African-American communities, but the near absence of historic records on the cemetery and highly ephemeral surface representation precluded making any definitive assertions about the cemetery's place in society.Archaeological evidence suggests Avondale Burial Place was used by African Americans between the 1820 and 1950 with the greatest component of the assemblage likely deposited after the Civil War (Matternes et al. 2012).A concentration of graves was present in the central portion of the complex with later period graves radiating outward.These simple, undecorated coffins with few to any accouterments suggested the Avondale Burial Place had its beginnings as a slave cemetery (Matternes et al. 2012).The graves were all oriented east-west, a common practice of both European-Christian and African-influenced burials.In the case of European-Christians, burials are usually positioned in an east-west alignment with the head facing west in order to allow the dead to face Jesus on his arrival; it is also symbolically attached to rebirth (Milbauer 1989).Early African

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