Preservation Project Leads to New Opportunities for Students

ATLANTA — A project on Daufuskie Island in South Carolina is helping to record and preserve Mary Field Cemetery, which has been in use since the late 1800s and is the largest Gullah cemetery on the island.

The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of Africans who were enslaved on the rice, indigo and cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic Coast.

The project began in 2022 through a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Action Fund. The first trip to the island took place in October 2022. Tiffany A. Player, an assistant professor in the History Department, and Chad Keller, the director of Georgia State’s Heritage Preservation Program, noted that 60 grave markers were readily visible when just walking through the cemetery.

This section of the project, spanning from October 2022 to August 2023, is just the beginning of the work on Daufuskie Island.

“This project involved developing a conservation plan for the cemetery,” Keller said. “Before you begin any work, such as repairing or cleaning headstones, you have to document the existing conditions of the markers and site."

They began with three-dimensional laser scanning (TLS) to map the entire cemetery virtually. Next, they imported this map into ArcMap software, allowing them to add specific information like names of people buried in certain graves to their map.

In February 2023, Georgia State students lent a hand to the process.

“That’s when we began photographing and creating an inventory of every headstone. This involved filling out an individual marker survey form,” Keller said. “We also went ahead and made a note of any visible depressions that might be unmarked graves.”

After students completed their inventories, Jeffery Glover, an associate professor in the Anthropology Department, was asked to use ground-penetrating radar (GPR) in the cemetery to try to locate any unmarked burials.

“We had 50 to 60 unmarked burials discovered through that,” Keller said.

Though revealing the history of the Mary Field Cemetery is academically fascinating, Player said the main reason this project started was to benefit the Daufuskie Island community.

“This is for the community, making sure that they have access to the site and to the folks who are remembered as being buried there,” Player said. “The initial reason behind us getting involved was to help the residents understand the long history of the Mary Field site.”

“I think the process of us showing the potential for an academic community-engaged project has created a kind of blueprint that could be used to create cemetery conservation plans for other historic cemeteries, especially because some of these cemeteries are endangered through coastal erosion or encroachment by new development,” Ras Michael Brown, an associate professor in the History Department, added.

Another exciting component of this project is the amount of student involvement. In addition to the fieldwork completed by students in the heritage preservation program in February 2023, Player, Brown and Keller were able to establish a field school during the 2023 summer semester.

“We were able to take a cohort of six students from GSU to participate in the Gullah Geechee field school,” Player said. “Because of our previous connection with Daufuskie Island, the students were able to tour the island, learn about the history of the island and see the work we had been doing in Mary Field Cemetery. This was a way for us to bring different students to the site, some of whom were from the History, Africana Studies and English departments.”

Two Georgia State graduate students, Natasha Washington and Debra Dozier-Coulter, also joined Player, Brown and Keller in a presentation at the 2024 International Gullah Geechee and African Diaspora Conference to talk about their work on Daufuskie Island.

Player and Brown plan to do another field school in July, this time taking students to Charleston, S.C., another site in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.

“We’re hoping we can make the field school a regular pedagogical and community-engaged offering for our students,” Player said.

—By Katherine Duplessis, Photo by Chad Keller