History meets science at Texas historic cemetery
Rice students search for slavery-era graves at Prairie View cemetery

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

The physical sciences crossed paths with Texas’ cultural history this week when a group of Rice University graduate students took the latest tools of geophysical science into a remote field at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) to search for unmarked graves in one of Texas’ few known slave cemeteries.

“They are finding graves that we did not know existed,” said Akel Kahera, associate professor of architecture and community development at PVAMU and director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture. “And the beautiful thing about this equipment is that it can give us a reading of the location of these graves, and then we can do further research to try to identify who the people are that may have been buried in these locations.”

This is the third year that Kahera has teamed with the students and instructors from Rice’s Earth Science 515 course to search for unmarked graves in and around the Wyatt Cemetery on the northern portion of the Prairie View campus.

Prairie View, the second-oldest public institution of higher learning in Texas, was founded in 1876 on 1,000 acres of land that had been part of Alta Vista, one of Texas’ largest pre-Civil War plantations. Though there are no written records of a slave burial ground for Alta Vista, oral histories and a few old headstones suggest that the area around the present-day Wyatt Chapel Cemetery served as the slave burial ground for both Alta Vista and Liendo, another large plantation nearby.

Most of the students in the two-week course are science teachers in elementary, junior high and high schools throughout the Houston area. Many have returned for two or three years and say the course pays dividends in the classroom.

TOMMY LAVERGNE
A handful of marked graves are located in the area that’s believed to contain the remains of pre-Civil War slaves. The marked graves, which date to 1862, include three veterans of the first and second world wars.

Shawn Wegscheid, a teacher at Westchester Academy in Spring Branch Independent School District, who is participating for a second time, said, “It shows students that there’s more than just commercialization. There’s more than oil. There are other aspects of science that they can really get into if that’s what they’re looking to do.”

The students use ground-penetrating radar, GPS and high-tech survey instruments to catalog and map suspected graves. Later, in the classroom, they use the data to create a sophisticated map that PVAMU researchers can augment with archival and historical data.

One of the course instructors, Dale Sawyer, professor of Earth science at Rice, said investigating the geology and geography of the area can help reveal clues about the cemetery’s history.

“We’re interested in the geology and the depth of the clay here to tell us something about where we expect burials to be,” Sawyer said.

He said a dense layer of clay lies about three feet below the sand in the area, and because the clay is so difficult to dig by hand, most burials were no deeper than 2-3 feet.

The course’s lead instructor, Davin Wallace, lecturer in Earth science at Rice, said the ground-penetrating radar lets the class see unusual features down to about 10 feet. It doesn’t give a photographic image of what’s beneath the surface, so the class uses it on marked graves to see the sort of signal that is returned by a burial as opposed to a tree root or buried stump.

	TOMMY LAVERGNE
	Ground-penetrating radar can identify unmarked burial sites. From left, graduate student Becky Minzoni, lecturer Davin Wallace and professor Dale Sawyer, all of Earth science, review GPR results.

When a suspected grave is located, GPS is used to get a rough fix on the location and flags are placed for follow-up surveys with state-of-the-art laser-ranging devices.

“We use the survey equipment because GPS can be off by several meters, and when we find a feature of interest, we want to know exactly where it’s at, to within a decimeter,” Wallace said.

Kahera said the work of the Rice team is vitally important in the documentation of the history of Wyatt Chapel Cemetery.

“We love this partnership, and I hope we can continue it,” he said.

Sawyer, Kahera and Wallace each said a large measure of the success for the program goes to Alison Henning, a former lecturer in Earth science who founded and led the program at Rice during its first three years.

The class wraps up next week with additional work in the classroom and the field and a final presentation of findings Thursday at the Prairie View A&M archive.