Many creative pieces, known as master’s theses, often are doomed to remain forever in the stretch-wrap that entombed them when first placed on the library shelf.
Some are esoteric (just like the word “esoteric”), in a language and on a subject so narrow that only devout followers in that field would conceivably enjoy reading it.
A dozen years ago, my colleague at Highlands University, Dick Panofsky, observed that two identical VW Bugs in the parking lot of Mortimer Hall appeared to be of different heights. One seemed five inches shorter than its twin.
Later, when the parking lot was empty, we noticed repeating patterns, a series of some 15 rectangular depressions. One of us asked, “What if the parking lot is on top of a burial ground?” Meanwhile, a parking lot that has become Central Park, bordered by Sininger Hall, the Laura Shields Science Building and Donnelly Library, exhibited similar patterns, amounting to 70 burials. Three more were discovered only recently during construction of the Ivan Hilton Science and Research Building.
The discoveries partially answered the questions as to whether the depressions resulted from coffins that had collapsed over time. One person who observed the interesting patterns and turned the curiosity into high-quality research is Susan Swan, then a graduate assistant in the anthropology department. Her master’s thesis: “Bare Bones, the Flesh of History,” reads like a detective novel.
Most good research starts with a burning curiosity to discover more about phenomena. Reading Swan’s page-turner thesis makes one aware of countless ways of testing hypotheses. Probably even to Swan, a graduate of the University of Kansas at Lawrence, the archives presented more questions than answers and opened up myriad ways of looking at problems.
In 1978, during heavy construction in the area of University, Columbia and Washington streets, city police contacted Highlands anthropology professor Bob Mishler for a professional opinion on bones discovered during construction that were believed to be human.
Old maps identify the above streets as Main, Blanchard and Interocean, respectively. In that area, workers came across a burial place. What was a cemetery doing in the middle of the Highlands campus, in the middle of town? Using burial records from Our Lady of Sorrows Church, census records and personal interviews, Swan set out to discover not only why a large cemetery would be in that location but also why nobody seemed to have known about it.
How did large burial areas get paved over to put up a parking lot? And why didn’t anyone notice?
News of the discovery appeared in the press, and to Swan’s surprise, nobody responded. Does that indicate a pauper’s cemetery where few if any of those buried there had relatives?
Swan provides several insights:
The location of the cemetery, in the late 1800s, was at the east end of town. Within six months of the arrival of the railroad, in 1879, a town of 1,000 residents sprang up, and the cemetery suddenly found itself in the middle of town.
Only open prairie existed on the current Central Park spot. As for the obscurity of those buried there, Swan attributes this to centuries-old European beliefs that the body is merely a temporal vessel for the soul, and therefore, the physical location or condition of the body after death is not important. And she also surmises that grave markers often were simple undecorated stones recognized only by immediate family members.
As to why nobody ever seemed fazed by the possibility of having a long-dead ancestor buried there, Swan said people may not have been aware of their right to make a claim. Or else, “How would they be able to identify their ancestor and would they have to pay for re-burial?” Swan asks.
Two terms keep appearing in the master’s thesis: “cemeterio” and “campo santo.” Part of Swan’s quest was to discover whether “upper class” denizens got buried in cemeteries, whereas those with lesser means were relegated to a Potter’s Field.
The research called in an array of techniques and devices to identify the kinds of people unearthed through excavation. The thesis cites people like Mishler and Anselmo Arellano, a former Highlands faculty member and local historian.
Swan sought to identify people by age and sex. However, it’s not as if there were ever entire skeletons available for examination and analysis. The bones, referred to as the “Sininger Site Collection,” reside in a climate-controlled laboratory in Hewett Hall. But before being examined, the remains had become co-mingled; there were ample femora (thigh bones) and tibiae (shin bones) to indicate the disinterment of approximately 133 people. And although DNA analysis was available in the early 1990s, Swan explains that the cost of using it would have been prohibitive.
The research yielded some noteworthy discoveries: the condition of the pubic bone often indicated whether the person had ever been pregnant; degrees of calcification shed light on social stature, e.g., whether the person had been a field worker, exposed to more sunlight than one who stayed indoors.
Dentition gave clues as to people’s diets and approximate age.
Extrapolation of body parts indicated females as short as 4-foot-l0, with men seldom taller than 5-foot-l0, and a great number of men as short as 5-foot-2. Adult women outnumber adult men, 50 to 11. Fifty-one appeared to have been youths.
The 175-page thesis, with about 65 pages of maps and charts, arrives at some general conclusions, but as Swan said she expected when beginning the research, a huge collection of co-mingled bones makes definitive research that much more difficult.
Swan perhaps will always wonder how many more burials remain at that site.
“And I will always wonder about the lives of these people. Who were they?
Did they see the Army of the West camped with cannons on the hilltop, or hear General Kearney’s speech?” Many questions may never be answered for Swan or for future archaeologists.
She wonders whether some of those buried were cibolleros (buffalo hunters) and whether they traded with Plains Indian tribes. “Did they fight in the Battle of Glorieta?” she asks, “And did the Santa Fe Trail bring them to Las Vegas?”