The Harvard Gazette | Bringing Legacy of Slavery report to life

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to share this highlighted coverage of Jason Ur’s “Can We Know Our Past?” course, co-taught with Rowan Flad, in The Harvard Gazette.

As the university and faculty have begun to bring recommendations from the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report (released in April 2022) to life, Ur and Flad’s course seeks to do its part in honoring enslaved people through memorialization, research, curricula, and knowledge dissemination.

 

Students taking Jason Ur’s course “Can We Know Our Past?” have trekked to the Old Burying Ground in Cambridge for more than a decade to analyze how headstones have evolved through time through design and symbol usage. Two gravesites on the far northwestern side of the cemetery, those of young, enslaved girls Jane and Cicely, require some effort to find.

Little is known about Jane and Cicely, who are the only known enslaved people buried in the historic cemetery, which was opened in 1636 and accepted regular burials until the early 1800s. Back in the classroom, Ur asked students whether they had found Jane and Cicely’s headstones among the more than 700 others. The question typically receives a resounding “no,” prompting students to return to search for the pair’s final resting place.

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“Our students are very interested in the world beyond campus. If you can explore some issues of history or society through a lens that they can appreciate, it can be very powerful,” said Ur, the Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology, who teaches the course with Rowan Flad, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology. “Here we can talk about inequality; we can talk about racism; we can talk about the Legacy of Slavery in a space that the students know intimately; and that is our campus.”

Read the full article here.