Soon after Hurricane Katrina, the
Department of Anthropology at The
University of Southern Mississippi
received a call to help recover human
remains found in Biloxi. It was
exposed after Hurricane Katrina. It had been
under the marine art studio which is
right by the Biloxi lighthouse. When Dr.
Danforth took a team to work on the
excavation, the group soon discovered the
site had been a French colonial cemetery,
dating back almost 300 years to when
biloxi with a staging site, attracting a
number of European settlers. Biloxi
was just a lot of times forgotten
about. So by doing this project we're
able to shed light on that that very
critical period in the development of
the Louisiana colony history. Over the
course of the next seven years,
researchers from Southern Miss and other
partner organizations recovered the
skeletal remains of 32 people from
around 1720. Learning about the French
was a wonderful experience where it
was so different from what had happened
with the Spanish and it brought in all
new perspectives on the colonialization
process, that I hadn't been
aware of. Those new perspectives had
an even greater impact on the students
who worked on the project. When they see
that they can apply the skills that they've
learned in class to an actual setting and
start to answer questions from history
or wherever it might be, the excitement that comes in
that this is really real. This is something
that I've learned has value and you
start to see the spark on their faces and
that's wonderful.
After collecting data, the bodies were
re-buried near the original cemetery
location, and culminated with an re-interment ceremony in 2013. From the
University of Southern Mississippi, I'm
Layla Essary.
