we are embedded in the past and the past is embedded in us. if you don't believe it, stay tuned. welcome to another standing room. only meeting. the initiative for the science of the human passed at harvard periodically. we hold public events and we're just beginning to come back to life, really. after the pandemic that share the results of the different research groups and laboratories and seminars that participate in this network. at harvard and farther afield. to present to you the learned and general public cultivated

public what our findings are and to open them for discussion with all of you. today we have a really special treat for all of us about a subject that is filled with pain and joy and wrecking mission of the challenges of the human past and of assuming our responsibility as historians, as archeologists and as archaeal scientists to understand the past. however unpleasant it may be, this event is close, sponsored by various departments and programs at harvard, the department of african and african american studies history, human evolutionary biology, the hutchins center for african and african american research at the initiative for the science of the human past and of course, the standing committee on archeology. the goal of the initiative for the science of the human past, which is about a dozen years old

now at harvard, is to weave together the different scholars and laboratories and seminars and research programs afoot in this vast and complicated university and to together bring the power of the scientific advances of the 21st century to bear on uncovering new information, completely new information about our human past and to do so in collaborate, meeting with students, scholars, veteran art geologists, historians and scientists from the beginning of their harvard experience up until they move on to tenure and beyond. here in creating new knowledge together, we aim to try and sustain this critical map of researchers that begins in freshman year. i interviewed a freshman for working with us just yesterday and to keep everybody fed. no small task at harvard is those of us who are inside the institution know, as opposed to

those who watch from outside and imagine dollar signs. every time we look at a problem. we do too, but we're looking at the red dollar signs and in so doing, to bridge the divide between the two cultures of the humanity vs the sciences. and that's what we're up to. and tonight offers us a really remarkable experience in which the sciences, and particularly today, the life sciences, the data sciences and the earth sciences are combining with the humanities to open a completely new windows on the human past. from our very beginnings down to very recent times indeed. the initiative for the science of the human pet is a network across vious schools and divisions of the university that organizes and helpand encourages and sustains one another and has been going as i say, for about a decade, 12 years now. it is the partner at harvard of the virtual marx park, harvard

research center for archaeal science of the ancient mediterranean. we're partnered with the max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology at leipzig of recent nobel fame for 70 people work on the neanderthal genome, which was done in part here as those of us who were here at the time. well, remember which offers a whole new set of tools working together with the compliment. tree strengths of the boxpark society of germany and of harvard university city. a word from our sponsor in mid-april. we'll have another one of these events about recent discoveries from ancient dna out of the reich lab and the max planck covered research center, which integrate archeology history, acute genetics to understand the mass of migrations that we are discovering took place inside the roman empire as it rose to its peak and those that originated outside of it, as it ran into new difficulties. so the sites of the human past i

mentioned neanderthals. is it only about the remote human past? our answer today, i think, is pretty clear. no. it comes right down until the present. many of us are able to identify our ancestors, our immediate ancestors, to oral tradition. grandma told me that x, y and z. and occasionally it's even true. some of us are able to turn to written records and to push the story further into the past. but there's a large group of americans, americans of african ancestry, who were mostly excluded from one of the most important repositories of knowledge of our human past. the national censuses, ordered by the constitution, enslaved african-americans were excluded until 1870, and only from that time forward can they follow the their direct ancestors. in most cases, you can see here the first census for los angeles, and you can see the b for the people who are classified as black in the

census of 1870. the human past. the site of the human past uses different scientific methods. today, we're going to talk mostly about our genetics and ancient dna, but we're going to hear a little bit about remote perspective in those spatial data sciences, and we'll hear a little bit about isotopes which have nothing to do with ancient dna but come from the same human evidence. skeletal remains, and tell us different stories. what is ancient dna? arc genetics based on ancient dna. a specialist for the united states military at fort detrick once told me ancient dna is dna that's not walking. so it really does bring us down to the present day plays a very important part in the american military for identifying missing were particular really thrilled that today's presentation is able to occur in black history month of 2024. we hope that this brings special joy to all of you to see the kind of work that the size of the human past is able to do

today on this wonderful occasion, i myself, as many of you know, have a background in economic history. and so i'm familiar with the the first stages of the total industrial revolution in new england with in which water power and then steam power were harnessed to machines and largely young women were harnessed to the machines to produce the textiles. and it's only through this project that i learned that in the 18th century, in many in some parts of america, human power was also harnessed to those machines, but not through wages, through enslavement. and that is the story that the wonderful research team that you're going to hear from today has encountered and uncovered bit by bit from the first rescue excavations in the 1970s and eighties, down to the publication of the paper in september, catoctin furnace, maryland. we have the special privilege of

having here amongst us the elizabeth anderson cohort who has joined us for this and has stinson. elizabeth has played a pivotal role in organizing knowledge of continuing, i believe, in a tradition that was begun by her mother. yes. and hers is the person for outreach, for the findings of this study, for the descendants collateral and perhaps direct from the community that worked at that correct amount. so please applaud and welcome them for having journeyed to the far north from the temperate climes of maryland, where once i live myself. so this is about the catoctin iron furnace, about ancient dna and about the discoveries that have followed. the research was led by dr. aideen harney, who got her ph.d. here in the department of organismic and evolutionary biology and who is now a st-doc with 23 and me and a lecturer in human evolutionary biology and was evenor a

period of her graduate studies supported by t science of the human past. and professor david reich in whose lab it was done and who is one of the founding figures of archaea genetics and one of the forces of nature in this whole field. and you'll hear from both of them. so we're going to begin with professor reich offering a little introduction, an extremely is going to be joining us and talking about her research. we'll follow up with a comment from my friend and colleague evelyn brooks higginbotham the victor as thomas professor of history and professor of african-american history, thinking about how what we're finding fits in to the bigger picture of u.s. history and african-american history in the u.s. jesse hoffnung-garskof has recently joined the department of history. the latest jewel in a crown. and we're very thrilled that he, too, a specialist of political and cultural migration latin, latin, american, latin and african migration and politics

and discoveries will be offering a brief comment as well. my friend and colleague jason ur. so with no further ado, let's welcome david reich to get us started. i can see and hear you perfect. the reason 18 is not here is that please on the last day of covid isolation and she really, really wanted to be here, this has been her project from when she was a grad student through her post-doc. and now she's a staff scientist at 23 and me. but she's here. she's actually fully healthy, but she's just has to follow the rules. so tomorrow we can see her in person. i think, or something like that. so the way we're going to do this in 15 minutes is i'm going to give a little introduction in to the motivation for the project for about 5 minutes. and then 18, and we'll talk for about 8 minutes and then i will talk for 2 minutes and we will have only 15 minutes of talking between us.

so it's going to come fast. and so i'm going to begin with motivation for this project. so this is a project where you see some faces up here, but it's actually a larger team. we've over sampled the faces of some of the people from harvard because this is a harvard venue. but this is really most of the people on this project are elsewhere, especially from the team at the smithsonian institution, which is represented here by dug owsley, elizabeth komar is here and also. people elsewhere. so i just wanted you to be clear that this is a larger team. this is also two papers that came out simultaneously, one about the science and one about thinking about the ethical issues involved in the complicated type of research that this was. this is actually quite new type of research. you'll see why. next slide, please. again, so brief. history of catoctin furnace. i'm not the expert on this. there are people here are

expert, but the furnace was established in 1774 and it was used to make munitions in the revolutionary war, for example. and it began using an enslaved workforce which stopped in 1850. and then the furnace itself closed in 1903 in the context of highway excavation, a highway was going through the cemetery, the african-american cemetery near catoctin furnace. and what that does is it often happens when that kind of thing happens. it triggers what's called rescue archeology, when a team goes in and excavates the cemetery and removes that in document said and the remains were curated at the smithsonian institution and then revisited with engagement with the community as part of this project, which had an ancient dna component. this is, of course, not ancient dna. it's not like the ancient greeks or neanderthals. it's historical dna. it's kind of a misnomer in some sense. it in next slide, please. so this is really a community

driven research project at the catoctin furnace historical society, of which elizabeth colmer is president and the african american resources, culture and heritage society. one of their goals was to, quote, identify a descendant community for the catoctin african-american workers enslaved and free to connect the individuals within the cemetery to their ancestral roots in africa and to share the discovery process and its results with the public. there was a museum at the site and this was something that they wished after consideration to happen. so a dna component of the project was part was what was requested. and so this project was initiated to address that. at the time this project began, they were no known genealogical descendants. that changed over the course of the project. where to genealogical lines were identified. next slide, please. so this new scientific instrument came online beginning in 2010, only with the first whole genome sequences where it

became possible to take human remains or remains from other living creatures. and in a clean room, such as we have several here at this institutions get beneath the surface of the human remains and take a little bit of powder or from the bone or tooth, usually that's being analyzed. and then to release the dna in a solution that removes the protein and mineral content and also the inhibiting substances, that that prevents the dna reactions from going going forward. and then to sequence the dna, which is miraculously preserved because bone and tooth material happens to be a good context for preserving dna and we're now able to get dna of the quality that you get when you send your spit sample to a personal ancestry testing company quite regularly and reliably from material that's 100 years old, a thousand years old, even 10,000 and often 100,000 years old. so it's kind of a miracle that we can do this next slide, please. so as a result of the technical

innovations which made this possible from the first whole genome sequences in 2010, in 2022, there were more than 10,000 individual tools with genome scale data of the same quality approximately as you get from sending your spit to a personal ancestry testing company that were published at that time. and there's tens of thousands of more that are in the process of being prepared for publication by multiple laboratories working on this. and this makes it possible to ask and answer questions that were not possible to ask before adding next slide. please. so the first ancient dna studies most of them focused on on really incredible archaic humans like neanderthals and other archaic humans that were published for the first ones in 2010. and then the largest number of ancient individuals has been on prehistoric individuals, people who lived before the time of writing. and there have been really extraordinary findings that have come from analyzing such data, which makes it possible to compare these individuals to each other and to see how they're related to each other

and to people living today. but one of the things that's exciting, that personal ancestry companies like 23 and me, where it works can do is they can find long lost dna. cousins some of you may have done this. you submit your dna to one of these companies, companies and by finding bits of dna that are very large that you share with someone else, one of these other approximately 10 million people who have participated, you can find someone who's related to you who you didn't know. you might share a third great grandparent or something like this, and you find this and then you can contact them through the company and perhaps trace your common ancestor. so people have been using this to find long lost relatives. so the idea we had was, well, if we're looking at historic genomes, not prehistoric ones, but historic ones, ones that are somehow within dna cousins range of detectability of the present, we can open up this amazing thing where we can compare these historical genomes to 10 billion people who are in these personal ancestry testing company. if we can somehow put the historical genomes we get together with the personal

ancestry testing companies, which has never been done before. so the way this project initiated is that a dean went to this one of these personal ancestry testing companies, 23 and me and her project was to work on the catoctin furnace individuals and to see if we could connect those people who we were in search of a descended community for two. all of the people who were in that dataset and maybe we would find some relatives. so that was the idea. and so that was the genesis of this project, and that was what the maryland descendant community asked us to do. so now over 18. thank you so much, david. and i'm so sorry that i can't be there in person to present these results. it seems like such a wonderful event, but in the interest of time, i know there's a lot of people who are going to kind of provide some interpretation of what we found. so for my part, i'm really just going to give you a very quick overview of what we found in this study. so we were able to sequence the

genomes of 27 individuals who were buried in the catoctin furnace african-american cemetery. out of those 27 individuals, 22 had good enough quality dna preservation that we were actually able to include them in all of our analysis. but for all 27, we were able to learn some things about them. and when we compared the caterpillar individual just to one another and this is when we kind of found one of the most striking early insights about the cemetery. what we found is of those 27 individuals, they could be divided into five distinct genetic family groupings, which comprised of 15 of the individuals. so most of the action individuals that we found, but not all of them could be assigned to one of these different family groups. and what we found is if we actually look at the locations in the cemetery where these different members of these different families were buried, we saw that different family groups tended to be buried closely together and kind of the closer the relationship that we

identified, the more likely they are to be to be buried right next to each other and the types of relationships that we actually identified tended to be, well, they were either mothers and their children or siblings. what was really striking is that we didn't identify any genetic fathers among this data set. however, we don't want to kind of overinterpret that there's a couple possibilities. it could be that this is evidence that, you know, families were not kept together at catoctin, but it also could be the case that the cemetery was not totally excavated. so it may be that fathers were buried elsewhere in the cemetery, which might be consistent with the moravian style burial practices and those are the people who were the ministers who were actually doing burials at catoctin and the other thing that we were able to learn about the catoctin individuals very early on was just to do a broad assessment of their ancestry. so what we found is that all but one of the individuals had a majority of african related ancestry, however, many of them had some amount of european related ancestor. usually this was kind of 10% or

under, but for a few individuals there was kind of a striking amount of european ancestry. one individual in particular, individual 32, had over 50% european ancestry. they were actually very interesting because not only are they buried separately in the cemetery, they also had their maternal and paternal haplogroups. so we traced the lineages along their maternal ancestors and the lineages along their paternal ancestors. both of those traced back to a fully european ancestor. now we did find evidence of several other individuals in the cemetery who had european related paternal haplogroups, tracing back to a european male. but this was the only individual who had a fully european maternal haplogroup. and this kind of overrepresentation of european related paternal haplogroups is kind of consistent with what we know about the european ancestry that we see in enslaved african-american. as much of it was, you know, came through a process of a european males raping or

otherwise engaging in, you know, for sexual relations with african females. so that's kind of why we see this overrepresentation. those why are that paternal lineage. the last thing i wanted to mention on this slide is that we also searched for signals about the health of the catoctin individuals by looking for different genetic positions in the genome that are associated with health. and what we found is that several of the catoctin, individuals were actually either carriers for or they may have even had sickle cell anemia and some of them also had labels associated with g6 pd deficiency. both of these are diseases that impact the red blood cells and they're both actually the results of kind of an evolution, very selection to kind of provide a protective protection against malaria. but we do see both of these the alleles that cause both of these disorders are at high rates in kind of african people of african ancestry. so this is what we were able to kind of find very early on about

the catoctin individuals. but, you know, as david said, what we're very excited to tell you about today is how they connect to living people in genetic database like 23 and maize. so we were able to using the method that david mentioned, find connections between, the contact and individuals and we compared them to 9.2 million people in the 23 and me database. and what we found is that about 0.45% of those people shared a genetic connection to catoctin. now that sounds like a very small percentage, but when you factor in that, we're looking at 9.2 million people, that means that we found 41,000 people who have a genetic connection to catoctin. and if we look at what group was most likely to share connections with catoctin. this was participants in the united states who have at least 5% african ancestry. so they were the most likely to share our connection, which would make sense as they are kind of the group that we would expect our most closely related to the caterpillar individual. we also found that the catoctin individuals shared more distant genetic connections with

participants in europe and in west africa, and those are the connections i want to talk about first, because they can actually tell us something about the ancestral origins of the catoctin individuals. so if we look on this chart and i'm not going to spend too much time on this chart because it's kind of busy but if we look at this chart, we can see where people in the 20 among 23 research participant with connections to africa, where are they in terms of who has the most connections to catoctin individuals? so in the panel on the left, what we can see is this geographic distribution and participants who are locations where participate hence have the highest rate of sharing with the catoctin individual are shown in darker colors. and so that's really in kind of center gambia. and then angola is what we're seeing. and if we look at the ethno linguistic affiliation, so what research participants have told us about their ethnicity or their linguistic affiliations, we see that the highest rates of sharing are among people who identify as mandinka or wolof or kongo. and this kind of corresponds with those differences of graphic regions i just

mentioned. if we do the same thing, looking at connections to european participle, we see that the strongest connections are to participants in great britain and ireland. and so this can tell us something about those ancestral origins of where these individuals got their ancestry from in africa. and then for those who have european ancestry, where that european ancestry traces back to, i want to highlight what this means when we think about just one specific attacked an individual. we can do this for every individual. but i think it's nice to to just focus on one story. so this is the individual from burial 35. she's actually an individual that the catoctin furnace historical society did a facial reconstruction of. so you can see what she likely looked like here on the left. we know from morphological analysis that she was about 30 to 35 years old and genetically we confirmed she's female and we also found that she is a member of genetic family d this is not that surprising that she had a relative. she was actually buried with an infant who we confirmed genetically was her son and her brother was, also buried

elsewhere in the cemetery. so we're getting a sense of kind of her family. we can also see that she had about 96% african ancestry and just a little bit about 4% european ancestry. and when we look at that african ancestry specifically, we see that she has strong connections to the world often full groups. so in that kind of senate gambia area and then further the east, now this again is probably not exactly what you wanted to hear. you want to hear about connections to present day people in the united states. and so when we look at that, if we look at all the you talk to the individuals and anybody in the united states that they have a connection with, we see that the strongest connections are in the southeastern united states. now, this is not that surprising, because what this really is showing is just where people with african ancestry tend to live. in the united states, the highest rates of african ancestry in the united states. and this is because we're looking at all connections close ones, but also really, really distant ones that may trace all the way back to shared ancestors who lived in africa. now, if we want to think about

connections that are the close us, so people who could plausibly be directly descended or otherwise really closely related, what we did is we looked at people who shared the most amount of dna. so 30% or more gains of dna, and that translates to about a 90 degree relationship or closer and when we looked at just those individuals about 3000 people, what we saw is a really high concentration of those relatives in maryland. so this suggests that even though we can't you know, there wasn't much evidence of people having a connection, a direct descent connection to catoctin staying in the maryland area. it seems they are still there. and maybe just that family history has been lost. and the last thing i wanted to highlight is just when we look at the strongest connection that we were able to identify, this is with someone who is or with people who are actually in southern california. and this connection is back to this individual from burial five who i just mentioned, as we found people who share at least about 287 americans of dna with this individual. and that translates to about a

fifth degree relationship. so it's really likely that that's a direct descent relationship. and so with that, i'll turn it back to david. thanks again. so just be another minute or two. and so one question that we did not address in this study was how to inform living people who are genetically related to the people who labored at catoctin furnace and whose dna we sequenced. so that wasn't something that when we started out 23 and me protocols allowed us to do to recontact people with that information. but that's something that would be really great to do. and it's something that i know the people at 23 and me are thinking hard about to make possible. so it's certainly possible to do that. but it raises interesting sort of ethical issues or protocol issues about how best to do that. but that's one of the promises of this, is to make those connections. that's what the community asked us to do, to try to find a descendant community. so there's a lot of desire to do that on the part of everybody. and i think that there's progress happening toward making that possible to do.

and for example, hestia and elizabeth are involved in trying to make that possible. and i think we're trying our part to facilitate that as well. more broadly, beyond catoctin furnace, you know, are there other cases in which we might want to use this kind of approach where within dna cousin range of the present, in the last couple of hundred years, where we like want also want to identify descendant communities for other historical individuals either in cemeteries like this or a museum collections where the desire is to perhaps use this for repatriation. how does one and one it wish to use this? and then also for scholarship? what can we learn from this type of data can add in a meaningful way to what we know. so history and historical research is incredibly rich in this time period. you know, how could dna ever add anything interesting? you know, maybe you could add something interesting about neanderthals. but this period when we have so many written records and so much recording, so this example gives us a little example of, of of

how we can begin to learn these things. and it's a tool that in principle can now be used. okay, that's the end of my presentation. adalind, would you like to take over? thank you. david. thank you, lady. and we continue now with some thoughts from my friend and colleague, professor evelyn brix reading about the victor thomas, professor of history. she. well, thank you. it's really a a great honor to be here and. i'd like to start by telling you a different story, actually, a story that will relate to this catoctin story. and it's a story that i recently read in the sun this past sunday. washington post. i came across an article. some of you may have seen it on the descendants of two illustrious pre-civil war families enslaved in macon,

georgia. one family, the husband, wife, team of william and ellen craft, was in their time and continue to be to this day, famously known and written about because of their bold escape to freedom. their flight to freedom in 1848 took place because. ellen, who looked right, pretended to be a man and more than this she pretended to be a sickly slave holder, accompanied by his ensley saved manservant, who was really ellen's husband, william. they boarded a train northward, bound northward bound, and they rode from georgia, arriving ultimately in boston. now, this couple, ellen and william kraft, became outspoken abolitionists in the united states and in great britain.

the other family that i want to talk about was notable also, members of african descent. and this these were the highly siblings. they were the children of an enslaved woman. the common law wife of her white master. but unlike most, most slaveholders, he wanted his children to live in freedom. so he sent them away to the north, where they became prominent leaders in the catholic. in the latter decades of the 19th century, they passed for white, but were always rumors about them at the time, as they're biographers reveal. the most prominent of those siblings, patrick healy, who served as president of georgetown university. between 1873 and 1882. now the family law in the kraft descendant family maintain that

ellen kraft knew and was related to the mother of the healy siblings. but that contact between them would have occurred over 150 years ago. none the less. the kraft descendants could point to hints from, well, oral history. they had written reminiscence. raymond instances, gravesite, visits and a family album of photographs. but these hints were not sufficiently conclusive. hailey descendants learned of their black heritage much later in the 20th century, and there was nothing in the way of memories handed down over the years in their households that put the two families together as relatives are now a few historians in the past decade and even in the present. talk about ellen kraft, noting she was related to the healy family. but again, there was truly no conclusive no conclusive proof.

there was no document that stated this explicitly or stated how they were related or who the common ancestor was. now, what's so fascinating about this article? was the fact that the descendants of both families had been recently in contact. they had a zoom in december 2023, and they discussed how to prove that their family shared a relative. and of course, the only way they could prove that would be through dna testing, genetic testing provides answers to historical questions that would otherwise remain unsolvable. riddles. and this is why the article of the genetic legacy of african-americans from catoctin furnace is so compelling. it signals methodological changes in the discipline of history, and especially in african american history.

thinking about those changes, thinking about changes in history generally, i must acknowledge how more interdisciplinary historians are today. we still are. we still find ourselves immersed in the traditional primary sources of wills and diaries and census data correspond in deeds. and yet our search is often constrained because many times those sources no longer exist or they've been lost or destroyed. and for many african americans, some sources deliberately leave them out or like in the case of the heelys and the crafts, the records just don't say quite enough. now, what is particularly striking about the catoctin furnace story is its primary focus. unlike the story of the modern day heirs of the craft and hugely legacy the contact and story does not begin in our own

time, and it doesn't begin with descendant families in search of their roots. instead, the catoctin story begins with people whose birth dates occurred as much as two and a half ago. black people enslaved and free, whose very existence had been pretty much lost history until 1979 1980, when highway construction, as you heard, resulted in the excavation of part of the site. and when the remains of men, women and children were relais relocated to the smithsonian. and yet it is their their genetic story that looks back in time and finds its roots in specific ethnic linguistic groups. as you heard, and also in some english and irish roots.

and it is their story that also looks forward in time to those whom have a genetic relationship in the 21st century. now, historical scholarship has come increasingly to incorporate not only methodologies and insights from the arts and a range of social sciences, but more recently as the science of the human past so impressively exemplifies, historians are able to render the past with deeper understanding of its complexity through the physical and natural sciences, as through the life sciences, the earth sciences, the data science. this makes it and the goal to explain change over time and place along changing groups of people and their environmental surroundings. all of this required increasing attentiveness to fields such as

archeology. epdm, geology, climatology, even paleo climatology and genetic analysis from dna, even ancient dna which is identified when you read the letter with the with the article with that little a and then dna and it is the ancient dna connection to present day dna findings from the genetic database. 20th in me that we're focusing on this evening now as a scholar of african american history, i see the catoctin furnace this article as a harbinger of new directions in my field and especially in the field. and it's a burgeoning field of african-american family history, as described by the articles, authors, genome sequence of the remains of 12, an individuals resulted in the further identification of five families, mothers, siblings, children with the total number of people in

those families being 15. the other 12 of the 27 do not appear genetically related. the ancient dna of the catoctin furnace group discloses genetic sharing with 41 over 30 really closer to 42,000 persons living in our time in the united states and in africa and in europe. and i found quite interesting and even a bit a bit moving the author's statement and i want to quote that statement when we consider genetic relatives who share most identical dna with the catoctin furnace rituals, we observed the highest rates of sharing in suggesting that at least some descendants stayed in the region. now, reading this reminded me of a point often made by my colleague henry louis gates jr about his family in virginia.

his family dates back to the american revolution, and if he were here, he would tell you that many of his cousins never moved away from the potomac river valley in the allegheny mountains. and this is halfway between pittsburgh and washington, dc. his relatives have in that valley for over 200 years for gates, three sets of his fourth great grandparents, of which two sets were freed by the american revolution and the other set free before 1821. now, the descendants who live there live 30 miles from where henry louis gates was born. and it is to this ancestral area that he and his relatives gather for family reunions. now, the articles, the article, authors, while finding wolf and mandinka and congo roots in the

language, even make connections as you heard, with traits associated sickle cell anemia. and one of my questions for you, when you talk about a glucose and i'm wondering that has something to do with diabetes but for african-americans whose ancestors date back to the to this to the the the early nation for these kind of african-american fans, a fundamental question and it's a haunting question is where in africa did my ancestors come from? and gates and unfortunately, he couldn't be here. he had conflicting obligation. and he asked me to apologize to all of you. but if he were here, he would tell you that his pbs show i don't know if you've seen finding your roots, but it's a show that's very popular because it reveals to his guests never before heard stories about their

ancestors. and while moments of really poignant surprise occur for both his white and black guests. the whites over whelming, they know their ancestral country of origin, but for most blacks, until genetic testing, there was no knowledge, no memory except to, say, africa, the continent of africa. so we learn so much from this this story because we learned that a little fact that black labor, both enslaved and free produced ironworks tools, munitions for the revolutionary war, and that blacks worked at catoctin at the catoctin furnace site during the era of the new republic, the early years of our nation's history. now, this is an important chapter in the history of african-american ants, because it tells of their work during the revolutionary war.

and it's an important chapter also because it tells of their contributions to the earliest industries, namely iron manufacturing in america. the article also briefly mentions the role of the current day catoctin furnace historical society and in the preservation. you're doing a great job of preservation of the african-american cemetery and its commitment to and i want to quote the authors, the authority of justice highlight the critical role that enslaved and free african-americans played in the furnaces history and in the growth of industrial wealth and power in the young united states. so i invite the audience to go to the website, and this is the website. in fact, this is not the front

page, the home page, but this is the catoctin furnace african cemetery, interpretive trail. now, you can go there and walk that trail, but you can also walk that trail virtually, which i did. and that the trail, the website affirms this this effort of restorative justice by bringing out the names. and this was very moving to me, bringing out the names. of the people you see this, the return of names. a person is not forgotten until his or her name is forgotten. and you can see the research that was done through federal census and marriage and baptist formal records and those names are all listed there. those first names. so i'd like to conclude simply by saying that cemeteries and the dead have a lot to tell us when this knowledge is through

ethical means and through the consent and engagement of descendant. everett fly, who is an african-american landscape architect. a graduate of our graduate school of design and nationally recognized as an expert on historic cemetery cities in san antonio, texas, and in other places, observes this, and i quote him no matter what race or creed cemeteries are sacred ground. they are places where our answer sisters are buried. and then he notes that burial artifacts are also discovered in cemeteries, which leads to the questions were artifacts. there were such items found and documented during the 1979 1980, maryland state highway administration excavation. excavation did the smooth did the smithsonian curate the human

remains? but also do a curation of other material projects? and finally, i want to thank aiden harney and david reisz and all of the people on your team for this article, because it welcomes into a mutually fruitful relationship. archeologists preserve, honest geneticists and of course historians. in. next, we have the privilege of hearing from professor jesse hoffnung-garskof. thanks. excuse. so i'm going to talk about the implications of this. what i think is really fascinating project that you've already been hearing about from my own work about a community of african born people that moved

from cuba to south florida at the end of the 19th century and maybe has more general frame. i'm interested in talking and thinking about this project from in the context of what we might identify as a growing and very fertile field of scholarship in latin american and caribbean studies, which seeks to draw direct connections between specific events, communities and individuals in the americas and specific events. communities and individuals in coastal africa. right. so not general links between general cultural areas or linguistic areas, but specific links between individual roles and events in both sides of the atlantic. it's really this work not hindered by the absence of census census reporting about afro descended people. available about the transatlantic slave trade inquisition records and careful attention to the historiography

and documentary sources available in atlantic africa to try and build those that kind of those kinds of links. and in that frame the promise of the current paper of the paper that we're discussing today lies very clearly in the possibility of using dna to further identify links between historical populations in the americas and contemporary genetic populations in africa that identify with particular linguistic identities or ethnic identities. without, of course, losing sight, as i think the paper is very good at reminding us of the complicated relationship that current genetic populations, even ones that express specific linguistic and ethnic identities, may have to historical populations and social formations that would be relevant to the to the historical questions we're interested in. right. so the present day identity doesn't necessarily map genetic identity, does something map on the historical identity. that would be interesting, but it is new information and interesting. so this would help not only in trying to identify the origins

of key individuals in the americas, but also in considering the role of shared geographic, linguistic and cultural origins. and in africa, the choices made by individuals in the americas when creating and community ties, though that help again would be indirect, because we don't know specifically what those current genetic populations would map on for the time. with all this in mind, though, i was curious to know more about this aspect of the cook of the of the current project. how robust was the data? i mean, we did see one really great individual of very robust data relating to links between individual families and self identified modern linguistic groups and modern genetic populations in africa. but i was wondering whether there were more individuals in the samples for whom the link to one particular modern population in africa is especially strong. and then also whether it's possible to hypothesize about how many generations of ancestors, a particular individual, buried in the cemetery had been in the americas, or even to hypothesize

whether some of the admixture between european and african dna may have happened, especially in the case of of folks who were from, ah, guinea, like the individual we looked at over the course of hundreds of years of contact between europeans and africans in atlantic, africa, trinidad and the sea, and in the atlantic islands. but the maybe counter posed or in dialog with this, i think optimistic and excited view of what the possibilities might be for this kind of research. i also wanted to propose a further discussion of ethical considerations, which again i really deeply appreciated their presence and their and the way that they were handled in this paper. but the current paper seems to have been the ethical conversation. the core paper seemed to be framed around a narrower question what are the ethics of performing this kind of analysis? and remains that have already been brought into museums or other cultural institutions, in a sense, the prior ethical question about how they came to be there. for example, the choice to build

a highway and simply dig up a sacred burial ground, which i think i agree is sacred, is already baked into the ethical question of what scientists should do with this material. and somewhat paradoxically, therefore, the paper is able to reprimand, recommend and subjecting remains that are already in museums. they have already been dug up to scientific research without consent for the purpose of identifying descendant communities who might then consent to the research or facilitate repatriation. all of which makes perfect sense. so i wonder, though, whether there are some situations in which the acquisition of genetic material was so questionable in the first place that even its presence in the in the, in the museums and the need to identify populations might still be questionable. but also i'm really interested in whether or not there's what the ethical considerations are about human dna that is currently undisturbed. how does one go about thinking about the ethics of collecting this genetic material specifically for this purpose? and i do understand from mike that there are some possibilities for collecting genetic material from human brains, but from from other

archeological remains. but even still, the question of collecting someone's genetic material without consent for purposes that might be very important for present day, it's something that's interesting to me. and it and it would definitely affect the way that this could be used in the in the context that i'm suggesting that finally i was very interested also very appreciative of the clear caveat that the authors make the genetic relation relatedness should not be misunderstood as the fundamental underlying measure of family relationships. right? genetic relationship is just one piece of evidence about who was family to whom. yet continue to be concerned. that caveats aside, this kind of analysis does tend towards exactly that presumption, if only because one confronted with the bright light of evidence about genetic relationships and the absence of evidence about other kinds of relationships is impossible not to start to fall into the trap of imagining that only one kind of relationship could have existed and this seems especially relevant to the context of new world slavery

since we know that the rupture of captivity spurred the creation of various kinds of kinship, which would likely, if not certainly be invisible to dna analysis, including really tight relationships among shipmates, people who were on the same atlantic voyage from africa to the americas. very important relationships created through god, parentage, and also through ethics. so it's hard to think about the burial site when i think about that image of burial site in question, in terms, it's hard to think about it in the face of the dna evidence. other in terms other than these other groups of people who were related. and these are the groups of unrelated people in the burial site. and so i wonder how, as human and scientists together we are to go about continuing to imagine, think about how to imagine and document the many ways of being related that those other humans in that burial site knew experienced and invented in the light of their experience of enslavement. and i will leave it there.

will have a concluding or a penultimate comment because i would like to say a few words. also from my dear friend and ancient colleague jason ur, who has done remarkable things in remote protection under very strenuous circumstances in iraq today. but also under less strenuous but challenging circumstances in other ways, about a few hundred feet from here in the burial ground of cambridge. thank you, mike, and good eating. good evening, everyone. i am not a historian. i i'm a landscape archeologist of the bronze and iron age east. but i found myself in the pandemic unable to access my research sites and in the need to somehow exercise my intellect. i turn to the landscapes that i did have access to, and that

includes the mortuary landscapes of colonial new england. and that's what brings me here tonight. this fantastic paper by a dean and david in their collaborators, really got me thinking about spatial relationships. and that's that's what i know. i'm somebody that thinks about space and landscape. so with my colleague ron flag, we have been taking our gen edge students into the old burying ground for nearly 20 years. at this point. and this has become my focus here. so i'm going to talk a little bit about how the journey at all paper has gotten me thinking about our space. so this is the old burying ground. you've probably seen it. it's on street and mass av. and this is the first burying ground of cambridge it was in use already, i think in the 6030s. and it has about about almost 1300 monuments inside. it represents the charlie sullivan, who's the head of the

cambridge historical commission, thinks that there may be. probably two or three times as many people buried in this space. so we have, in the course of our class, been mapping out we have a pretty good spatial database. you could see here that the burials tend to run east, west. they tend to in rows and rows tend to be of people who are related to each other. family, family. so when we bring the students in here, we tend be looking at teaching them things about what the headstones look and how iconography changes through time. now we've always been aware that there are the of two enslaved young women here tt's cicely and jane. we've been telling our students to look at the the the deaths heads. and that's that's typical a particular time and maybe it tells us something about little little something about religious traditions of the late or post puritan times but in the in the

aftermath of the murder of george and others and the black lives movement, we decided that that was a great time to pivot and, to look specifically at cecily and jane. so cicely died. in 1614. she was only 15 years old when she died about generation later, jane was 22 years old when she died in 1741. both of them are called -- servants on inscriptions. so two young women you'll if you can read the inscription that they're enslavers are memorialized by monuments as much as jane in sicily. so cicely was enslaved. reverend, mr. william brattle jane was enslaved to andrew boardman. so who are these two people? so william brattle, that name is

probably to many of you, he was the minister of the first parish church. he died in 1717, a couple of years after sicily. and is buried in this very ornate altar style monument. he was a harvard alum. he was a tutor at harvard, and he was a member of the corporation. andrew boardman was equally prominent. he was the second andrew boardman, he was a steward of harvard college for over 40 years. that's some kind the equivalent of the bursar at the time, but very important. he was the third of four boardman is that held hold this role he also has a really impressive monument very well carved the second style with that the with with wings this is a general how these people have been viewed looking at their headstone but as a landscape person i wanted to know how did these people relate to how did they relate to their families,

to the people they enslaved? and that's where things get particularly interesting. so the bordens are here in red. this is william brattle, the boardman, as you can see, a very close two families are really tight together. however, they're really far away from sicily. and jane more than 40, 50 meters apart. so if we think about slave marie in the north as being somehow gentler or kinder because the enslaved were largely domestic labor inside the houses, they certainly considered family in death because families were buried close together and sicily and jane were not in fact, this is the situation in the burying ground. in 1741. you can see that the two of them are on the absolute fringes of the cemetery at that time marginalized in india as in life. but let's go back to that.

catoctin furness, burying ground. i got very interested in what was me about space and genetic relationships, so i got very interested in this this map here. it shows a very similar arrangement. it shows rows of burials roughly, oriented east west headstones and foot stones. in the case of catoctin furnace, they are field stones. they're not carved with with names and in information. but the information comes from the from the genetic. that's what's particularly fascinating to me. i will zoom in here on family a where you can see three in a row you have a young woman of about 25, 22, 24 years old, and her two infant sons, both both in the first year of their lives, buried, lined u as we see with, for example the the boardman family. we d't have this nd of spatial information for the

enslaved of cambridge. we only had these these two headstones. now, what this tells me here is that perhaps we might see a similar spatial arrangement, a similar mortuary re practice were we to have more information about where the enslaved at cambridge and, elsewhere in new england were buried. but we don't however, i want to point out that the area where cicely and jane are buried in, in old burying ground is kind of vacant. it's it's largely empty, except for their headstones in a few other outliers, strangers of colonial cambridge. so we have proposed to the legacy slavery initiative that in fact, cicely and jane aren't just the they're not the only two enslaved in cambridge. they're just the only two that they got headstones. we think that there might be more of cambridge's enslaved here. so the area that you see in yellow we have done geophysical survey, we've done ground penetrating radar here and we're beginning to get our result

here. we'll be interpreting it with an eye towards catoctin furnace and how and how those enslaved people were buried. if you'd like, know more about this. it just so happens that tomorrow my collaborators, asia, lance and drew bear, we will be presenting this in the archeology seminar in anthropology and can g me into what we're doing and if this isn't a big enough teaser, andrew bear will be presenting. our first grnd penetrating results. so thank you for your attention attention. thank you, jason, for that teaser. i know enough to say that going to look very different from catoctin mountain and you would really be excited to see what i've been privileged to see, thanks to jason sharing it with us. he looked at and immediately saw a pattern that was very, very

revealing. so i want to just offer a few concluding remarks by way of of what to lot two spike's the the discussion among us and to go back to the suggestion that jesse made and that we've heard from several others about what can the science of the human past tell us about individual souls, individuals that we can identify? and so i just went a little bit deeper into the story of the genetics and the other actual scientific evidence of one person here. and that's going to take us from the burial ground to the area where the slave quarters were identified by the archeologists to the mansion of the iron master and behind it to the area where the home of the domestic is thought to have been located. so we're going to wander around this area and think about it and the first thing we can think about is what jesse to sediment

dna this is one of the newest fashions and advances in ancient dna. it is possible to recover human dna from the soil itself. and so it becomes conceivable that we could retrieve sediment from the two places where we believe enslaved individuals and compare it to the dna of the people in the cemetery to see who, where, and perhaps what their activities were. the second angle i'm going to spend little bit more time on, and that is the what we can reconstruct of the lived experience of someone who today has no voice but whose voice we can nevertheless hear through her physical remains to some limited extent that i find personally very moving and that is individual 14 a woman who died around 3234 years old. she's one of those unrelated ones. she's related to no one else so

far. there are excavated burials. she perhaps has a relative. there. and you can see that rather like sicily, she's by herself in the cemetery she has orientation of burial and i o this insight to working closely our wonderful post-doc in early medieval funerary archeology cilantro odette dr. wardak is with us. notice how differently her body is oriented and compared to the others all the others are facing east looking to the resurrection in the christian fashion. she's quite different. this is her nuclear entire nuclear genome. it's similar to the others. it's a mix of african and british with a rather substantial amount of british ancestry. aiden, help me out with this. this afternoon and remarkably to me, she has a completely different mitochondrial dna

haplotype, that is to say her maternal ancestry seems to come from a rather different group from everyone else. and when we plot that out, comparing it to people in modern day africa, you can see these are other represented of individuals with the green and the the the yellow representing where they are in africa and they tend to be on the west coast of africa. but you can see that individual 14 a lot along all belongs to a mitochondrial haplogroup her maternal ancestry is pointing towards in terms of problem frequency towards central africa as the do not there's something different about her perhaps in her maternal ancestry as well. if we turn beyond dna to other archaeal scientific tools, notably isotope, which are a variant form of elements which behave a little bit that would

behave the same as the other elements have a different mass. and so you can differentiate them and your scientists use the ratios of different isotopes of carbon, for example, to determine the basic patterns of diet of an individual. and you can see here that individual. 14 that should be 14. scuse me, has an unusual diet. she eats more c more plants plants to follow see for photosynthesis or things that eight c for plants and everyone else every most people at catoctin eight wait and why based she had a diet that had more corn in it but perhaps corn alone but corn was being used according to the archeologist who published this in 2020. in historical archeology, she a corn that derived from the fodder of pigs. she was eating meat as others were, not again. it's a typo by me. it's individual 14. i look at her led level.

s anotmeasurement she has of all the people that were analyzed in the cemetery, she has by far the highest amount of lead in her bones. how do we explain that in colonial times it was normal for people of a certain status and wealth to eat and to prepare their food impure. her computer is made of tin and lead and so people who are okay off relatively well off eight off of pewter and have very high lead levels. you can tell people just arrived from africa in the archeological record because they have almost no lead in their bones. she ate off in all probability, unlike anyone else in the group. what does this add up to? a series of intriguing questions. one hypothesis returning to the orientation which is quite

different. everyone else, as you can see, is that this woman led a life that distinguished her from everyone else in the community by her diet, and perhaps by other aspects of her life and in death. those who buried her chose to place her in a different fashion. if one looks where she's located and one orients the map of the burials in the same way as the sketch map of the site, you can see that it almost looks like she's looking not toward the orders, but the iron master's home and to the house behind it. whether that's the explanation or some other is open for discussion. but it gives us some of how we can take together scientific analysis, put them together and begin to ask ourselves. questions about the life experience of this woman who stands out remarkably within her

community of burial. so i'm going to leave there. thank all of our speakers for the amazing things they've done and open the florida discussion. but first, a word of thanks once again, all. and if the speakers will come and sit down here, they'll be able to feel questions from. delightful audience. if you would, if will, you can see where the fire is coming from that way. floors open and feel free to comment on each other. of course a dean is with us. the noble dean, well, could be here, decided to make sure she was not going to take any chance of communicating. koga to us. a true scientist and friend.

please to that i would spend hours every day thinking about what these people who these people might be and comparing them to this amazing data set that we've been able to translate from the old german. and these are the moravian diaries records that are at exactly what infants names if you joined us late, this is elizabeth anderson komar, who has been a force of nature in getting this making this happen and documenting preserving and understanding this incredible historical and archeological site. i just want to say, i'm so glad you spoke of of burial 14 because she is intriguing and one of the things that i've found in moravian diaries is of an entry 14th november 1821.

i held another funeral in english. it was at the furnace. it's four miles from here. he's referring to grace ham, which was the headquarters of the moravian church in the area. and is exactly four miles from the furnace. the deceased woman had just last summer come here from england. the master of the furnace respectfully attended the service house with all his people. so very intriguing and tree first of all that master in this case was john. he was the master at that point with all his people all came to this funeral and her lead. you're right. her diet and her lead levels are so different. so one of the things i'd like to explore and perhaps to a graduate student here who wants to take this up, is could she be fact her could her lead be

related to her life in england and in bristol or london and where lead in the pipes, you know, was, you know, that's how you got your water right? and yes. and it could be also, as you pointed out, pewter. but could there be a connection here? we have a definite connection between our oldest, who is. you know, was bent double from his compression of his vertebrae. and he, in fact, were sure or i'm sure put this way that i have his burial or his mention, because he's described by the moravian. so just intriguing sort of how you connect the historical record in this case this very rich moravian tradition of giving these details, but also maddening, maddeningly leaving out the name was like, we know

this was a woman, but in some cases we don't even know that from the burials they say a burial, no gender or no age, but i'd love to explore. her lead levels as related to possibly early a life in england prior to coming to the to the colony or to the younger public. that is so cool. that's an amazing insight. david or aiden, do you have any thought about how her european ancestry might perhaps separate her from the others? catoctin as a potential way for exploring the possibility that individual 14 migrated from england to catoctin. so i guess i'll just chime in to say so. individual 14 was one of these individuals who had kind of a borderline dna preservation, so we were able to include her the

analysis, but she wasn't someone that we were able to to fully pinpoint the source of her european ancestry. so if we wanted to kind of explore that going forward, we could, you know, try to get generate more dna from her if that if that's something you know that's that's of interest but it would have been great if we had enough dna preservation to to go in and say, yeah, we found a likely source of this european ancestry. we didn't quite have enough dna preservation for that i can offer. david thoughts on that. i've just to say that the you know, due to where customers in 23 and we are there is very rich sampling from different parts of great britain for example in ireland relatively better than much than for example, in different parts of africa. so if there better data there, there's much more opportunity to find close relatives and to get this type of information and. so that is something that could be pursued it would not be very

difficult to improve the quality of data for this individual. i might add further, i don't know if we have any isotope specialists in the audience, but in certain cases, you know, for romans the isotopic ratio can where they what lead they were consuming which can point to the place where happen to live or the position they occupied in society. and then of course, strontium is so widely used to identify the geological sources of the water that individual drank. so access to individual for teens enamel would allow us to see very clearly or to have a clear signal year by year where she was consuming her water in her first 12 years of life, which could be compared to her bones to see if there was a substantial change. i have to say one of the things that really attracted me to the study was the possibility that

we were seeing some agency in the enslaved lived in terms of how they conducted mortuary ritual but now listening to elizabeth i'm wondering maybe that's not the case i have to say, because i'm assuming that jane in sicily didn't have family would be able to make decisions about where they would be buried. and it looked like catoctin with a furnace was a different story. but elizabeth, you raised the issue of the the services conducted by moravian priests or ministers. what do you think that the the meridians dictating the shape the arrangements the the burial ritual or was that something that they just oversaw and these decisions were made by the the families to descendants, the others, the enslaved community. i don't think we can answer that because but i will say that the moravian were very maybe rigid is not the word i should use,

but their activities very prescribed by by their religious tradition. and as a dean, one of the fascinating things that i found about the moravian burial traditions is that they bury their dead in choirs and a choir is children. a choir is unmarried women, unmarried men, married men, married women. and so you're not buried with your family. you're buried in. well perhaps it is a family. you know, it's it's a it's a different type of family. but it's so so that it's a great gift in, you know, writ large and in there some. which is four miles away. that's exactly their burial pattern. and it's very distinct. it's observable today so it

catoctin we don't know. i mean, we know that they were influential there was no other religious group that came to contact in until the the owners were all anglican. they were episcopalians. they then but they didn't have a church until. 1828 and so the moravian really were in charge. so they may very well have have the thought it's some or influence in determining a poet perhaps they converted to the moravian faith and followed the precepts. and you know it's interesting you should say that they did not come to church and they even say on one sunday, nobody came because they were out gathering chestnuts to sell for extra money. so it's that kind of rich detail that we have from these moravian diaries. and yet we don't have names,

questions from, our audience, pastor, chaplain chaplain. betsy pappas. yes. no joyce and then then orlando i wasn't sure for the presentation. and in terms of finding names whether there are any written records, business records or newspaper runaway ads that might identify individuals from this furnace. so just the historical record, what it give to fill in information because i couldn't quite tell from this case and i'm also curious earlier analysis of the doctor had tried to figure out whether any of the workers had any connection to iron produce sing parts of africa. so i didn't know whether you had new about that.

so in answer to the first question about these, the deepest oracle and very detailed historical that we've undertaken, we have produced charts of every mention of each individual, all enslaved, that's where we got the 271 names. so what we've done is we've taken each the we've compared over time name names from catoctin, from the wills, from built diaries, from every record that we can come across. and we've been able to identify families, for instance, we now know that wiley and i was just actually just two days ago found where wiley was the farm that wiley was on in 1811? his wife christina, his son

hanson, his son george, and his son henry. those are our family that we've been able to identify. the descendants of that are in hagerstown. if you watch our smithsonian documentary, they're the summers family. so we are tracing the through time based on, of course, first names, but then later they they become fully the last name buried individuals that were places that we don't have not yet. professor patterson. orlando patterson over it's a great question, but i don't i don't know whether there is any link, any link has been established between the individuals and the famous highly skilled iron production of western africa. 18. did you have a comment? yeah, i, that is one of the questions that we came, you know, once we had our genetic results that a question that we came to, to henry louis gates

junior, our collaborator, and also linda haywood, and john and john thornton from from b.u., who are kind of experts in african history. and they didn't think that they saw any of clear connection between, you know, region like iron centers and and and our results. but i think was just that we we kind of can't say anything one way or another based on what we found in this study. one brief thing for orlando speaks is that the connection that we find in africa are not our a little atypical for african-americans today there within the distribution but these people are early african-americans in the united states that they're close to african ancestors and typically today have ancestors was in many different parts of africa. these ones are specific parts a large extent and so for example that was pretty low representation of places like nigeria or ghana today, where there's lots of ancestors for

african-americans. but these particular people didn't have particularly large number of people from those regions. and just because the slave trade hadn't legally ended, you know, the slave trade ended in 1808 in this country. and they were there. but well. before 1808, there very early indeed. a professor patterson. to come and actually so regarding the eastward orientation of the bodies and the degree to which that indicates degree of agency, it's very interesting. the one major study of archeological study of slaves, the caribbean done by jérome

handler on barbadian slaves. and there he found that all all slaves were oriented eastward toward africa and that was a clear expression of agency because we know about caribbean slaves that they are were very, very convinced that they were going back their spirit to be to africa. so is this presentation interesting situation where it all traditions coincide the sense that also had an eastward orientation is that there are many such coincidences, by the way. i mean, if i may mention one of my favorites is that africans had a both funerary burial customs and very similar to the

irish night ceremony and they took very strongly in jamaica but so this this the this presents an interesting karen drum still how we interpret that orientation i find it fascinating the other question just raised by the early speakers having to do with african ironwork as no related to a major controversy in britain having to do with the ironwork x of caribbean slave is of jamaican slaves in particular the grinding of the sugar involved a lot of metal and this was done by slaves and all became expert at how to preserve and restore to the matter.

now a brilliant young historian by the name of jennie bull strode at last published a quite a revolutionary paper claiming that we one of the leading figures, the industrial revolution henry court, who patented very early in the industrial revolution and a method for converting iron into a finished steel, which is of one of the most important developments in the industrial. now strode claims that he had stolen the technique his patent was intellectual theft in that and she showed that in fact the technique at already been

developed by the jamaicans slaves who worked in the matter in the caribbean plantations and who brought it over to technique from africa. and that was created a real star among conservatives claiming that you their history had this has gone too far and really been sort of bloodbaths but that the data she presented is quite powerful that the jamaican metalworkers had known the technique which was patented by henry court and is why we come together to learn new things from our wonderful colleagues. i wonder whether anyone overseas or in the internet audience might have a question. two we have eden. let us know that there are there are a few people on the zoom who

are descendant and we have questions for you. yeah, but the hub, if you could relay those, what do you think? that's good idea. no, we'll listen. we'll listen together. yeah. so, yeah, but yeah. peter larkin is a graduate student in the department of history who is preparing beginning graduate studies in late roman history, later into history, she's doing her general fields in late antique history, medieval history and african-american legal history. thank you so the first question that we have from someone who has mentioned that they are a descendant is asking whether as a descendant, it would be possible to determine which genetic clusters or ancestral lines specifically that they can tie their genetic ancestry back to. within the group of 27 individuals, or if even possible, to identify specific ancestor in that cemetery group.

would you like to answer this, david, or should i? i'm suggesting you answer it. okay, great. yeah. so i just want to highlight i mean, think a few things. i think that one thing it's really important to mention at the beginning is the that we've developed is, you know, capable of identifying these genetic connections between living people and and the historical people like, those at catoctin. but there are, you know, many reasons why you could be, you know, a direct descendant and not share a genetic connection to those catoctin individuals when we're talking about how far back in time actually looking it is entirely possible to be genealogical related to someone or descended from someone and not have inherited any genetic ancestry. so that's one thing to just kind of keep mind. the other thing is that our is not while it's really well optimized we spend a lot of time optimizing it to be able to find these genetic connections, we

wanted to focus on ones that we really certain of and. so that means that there's also, you know, potential there's a potential that there is a genetic connection, but that we could potentially miss it. so when we're looking for these genetic connections, i just want to highlight that, you know, there may be genealogical connections or even genetic connections that we're not spotting. and then as many of our our presenters mentioned today, there's also many other kinds of relationships that could mean that you are connected to catoctin, but that wouldn't show up in genetics. and i know that elizabeth has done a huge amount of work kind of fostering a community, descendant community and also a collective kinship community that's associated with catoctin. so when we're looking at these genetic connections, these are something that can help point people towards, oh, you have a connection to catoctin, but there's going to be many other people. we may not be able to find a genetic section for them, but that doesn't mean that they're not connected it in some way.

that said, i mean, the method that we are working or that we have developed this approach right now, it's, you know, results have not been kind of returned to anybody at point. there's, you know, other kinds of places that have used the catoctin information, the genetic information and are kind of sharing results in ways. and we really can't comment on what they're actually doing this genetic data and how that would compare to our results. but we do hope one of the things that we've been thinking about is how do we return results on this really large scale? you know, we found 3000 people who are potentially very closely related, 41,000 people who share some kind of genetic connection and, you know, we do have the potential to be able to kind of share that information going forward. and it's something, you know, we at 23 are thinking carefully about if and when we can do that, i think it will be possible to kind highlight what are the specific connections that we identified, not just a broad connection to, but our

method is identifying specific connections between present day people and people in the catoctin cemetery excuse thank you. i think that that was wonderful thank you very much. and i know that there's another potential descendant out there with questions, but we would invite you, please, to send your question forward. we are now well past the allotted hour for our conversation. it's a testimony to the wealth and the richness of the information that's been laid before us and the opinions and thoughts that you have contributed and will continue to contribute. i would invite those of you who are here physically to come and join us for a glass and, a little refreshment and a snack and continue the conversation. face, face with our wonderful archaeal scientists and commentators. and to thank you all for being here, and above all, to thank you for what you've done to make this possible. thank you