Ground Truth: Archeology in the City

35m

Documentary account of the discovery and archaeological excavation in 1980 of First African Baptist Church Cemetery, a black American cemetery of a non-slave community in Philadelphia that closed in 1841, with very little documented in the archives and of which all physical trace had been lost for a century. Observation of the stages of the excavation, of the analysis of the bones in the laboratory and of what these burials were able to reveal about the demography of the time.