IQSS Spotlights Professor Jason Ur's Work Uncovering Colonial Slavery in Local Burial Grounds

In the heart of Cambridge, Jason Ur, Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology and IQSS affiliate, is unearthing histories long obscured.

The Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) recently published a feature on Jason Ur, Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology, whose research is using cutting-edge spatial tools to recover the hidden histories of enslaved people buried in colonial New England cemeteries. We're proud to share it here.

Ur is well known for his landscape archaeology work in the ancient cities of Iraq, where tools like satellite imagery, drones, and GIS have allowed him to map entire empires. When the COVID-19 pandemic grounded him from fieldwork in 2020, he turned those same methods toward Cambridge's Old Burying Ground — a cemetery dating to the 1630s he had long visited with students, but which took on new significance in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the national reckoning on race that followed.

Working with postdoctoral fellow Dr. Aja Lans and graduate student Andrew Bair, Ur focused on the graves of Cicely and Jane — enslaved Black women who had worked in the households of Harvard faculty in the early 1700s — whose headstones stand in deliberate isolation at the cemetery's northwest edge. Using drones, photogrammetry software, and ground-penetrating radar, the team identified nearly 50 unmarked burials nearby, likely including many of the more than 70 individuals enslaved by Harvard faculty and staff between 1636 and 1783 who never received formal headstones.

The patterns that have emerged across 20 Boston-area cemeteries are striking: the graves of enslaved people are consistently found downslope, in corners, and set apart by wide margins of empty space. As Ur put it, "There seems always to have been an area that was set apart for the enslaved."

IQSS is now supporting Ur in managing a geospatial database of over 20,000 documented monuments — a collaboration that exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary, data-driven research the institute enables. "Archaeologists historically have been very solo operators," Ur noted, "but we really need the support that IQSS brings to handle monstrous data sets."

Read the full IQSS feature here.