Conference Agenda

St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and cemetery in Helenville was established by German settlers in 1848 and is one of the oldest congregations in the state of Wisconsin. As time passed, the grave markers in the oldest portion of the cemetery adjacent to the church fell into disrepair and the records were lost. In 2025, Chronicle Heritage was contracted by the church congregation to confirm the presence of unmarked graves along the east side of the church for an expansion project. After identifying more graves than anticipated, Chronicle Heritage worked with church community leaders to develop a plan to exhume and relocate burials within the cemetery. Forty-nine individuals were removed and reburied. The church community and parishioners collaborated with Chronicle Heritage on all aspects of the project, including excavation, reburial, and invaluable personal and historical knowledge.

In the late 1800s, thousands of graves from the historic town of Kaskaskia were reportedly relocated to Garrison Hill Cemetery in southern Illinois. But were the human remains truly moved, or just the headstones? This research uses ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry to explore that question. Surveys were conducted in various areas of the cemetery: sections with visible headstones, open spaces where graves may be missing, and zones likely tied to poorer or marginalized individuals. The results show contrasting patterns: some areas reveal strong geophysical signals suggesting burials, while others appear empty. These findings raise important questions about how the relocation process occurred and whether all individuals—especially those from lower socioeconomic groups and minority religious communities—were properly reburied. By tracking the movement—or absence—of the dead, this project engages with the conference theme of “Mobility,” revealing how even in death, people may be unequally moved, acknowledged, or forgotten

In historic North American mortuary contexts, the meaning of shoes beyond mundane material culture remains a largely unexplored topic. When recovered from within these contexts, however, their associated skeletal remains can provide key demographic and diachronic information, resulting in comparatively greater interpretive value. Using mortuary data from Freedman’s Cemetery (1869-1907), an African American cemetery located in Dallas, Texas, this project explores the presence of shoes and the rationale for their inclusion within the graves of African American children in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow-eras. This project integrates folkloric, ethnohistorical, and archaeological data, exploring the ways in which shoes—as items frequently denied to individuals, especially children, during enslavement—may be more than mundane material culture and/or consumer goods in the postbellum period. Rather, they may serve as potent material signs of personhood and freedom utilized by African Americans in the years directly following Emancipation.

Development, increasingly frequent and powerful storms, sea level change, and coastal erosion have dramatically impacted historic and archaeological resources, including cemeteries. While communities can grasp the loss of structures and roadways, cemeteries often feel like immutable landscape features, the cornerstone of cultural traditions. In reality, they have proven to be just as susceptible to damage, loss, and erasure. But the expression of the loss of a cemetery is heavily layered and socially and culturally compounded with other forms of grief. This paper presents archaeologists with methodology to more responsibly and wholistically combine issues of preservation, restoration, and the effects of grief and loss. The goal is to build community networks so that those coping with the confusion and pain of disenfranchised and/or ambiguous grief over the loss or irreparable damage to sacred and cemetery sites can find others going through the same to validate, support, and build new meaning..