Free Hybrid Lecture
Location: Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Speakers: Jason Ur, Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University & Aja Lans, Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Since the founding of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1630s, the Old Burying Ground—located steps away from Harvard Square at the intersection of present-day Massachusetts Avenue and Garden Street—has served as the final resting place for many notable figures tied to Harvard’s early history. These include Henry Dunster, John Leverett, and Benjamin Wadsworth, as well as prominent families, Allston, Brattle, Craigie, Davis, Hancock, Porter, and Tufts, whose names remain familiar in Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston today. The cemetery is also the burial site of at least two enslaved individuals, Cicely and Jane, who lived and died in the early eighteenth century, and of Charles Lenox and his daughter, two free Black residents of the early nineteenth century. In this talk, Jason Ur and Aja Lans will discuss these burials and reveal how they use noninvasive research tools—such as photography, digital mapping, and radar technologies—to shed new light on slavery in New England and colonial burial practices.
Advance registration is recommended.
Free admission. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 4:00 pm. Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.
About the Speakers
Aja Lans is Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Anthropology and Africana studies. Her research integrates Black feminist and decolonizing theory into bioarchaeological investigations while questioning the ethics of curating human remains in university and museum collections.
Jason Ur is Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He specializes in early urbanism, landscape archaeology, and remote sensing, particularly the use of declassified US intelligence imagery. He has directed field surveys in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. He is the author of Urbanism and Cultural Landscapes in Northeastern Syria: The Tell Hamoukar Survey, 1999-2001 (2010). Since 2012, he has directed the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey, an archaeological survey in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq. He is also preparing a history of Mesopotamian cities.
