Early Investigations

While early European explorers of southeast Louisiana had commented extensively on the Indigenous communities with whom they came into contact, the field of American archaeology emerged in the nineteenth century largely as an outgrowth of attempts to understand the relationship between the evidence of past mound-building civilizations and contemporary tribal nations, themselves rapidly being displaced to the West by settler colonialism.  

During the nineteenth century, there are occasional notes of unexpected discoveries during excavations related to construction of urban infrastructure, often with dubious details. Campanella (2020:7), for instance, cites an 1853 Daily Delta account that mentions at least two discoveries of presumably Native American remains around the city. One of these, in 1844, consisted supposedly of the finds of human remains in tree roots located 16 feet below the ground in the modern Superdome area, while the other, from 1828, consisted of fragments of “Indian pottery”, shell, and bone, from 30 feet below the surface at the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The details of which follow a formula that appears in many nineteenth century American newspapers of human remains being attributed impossible antiquity, often linked to erroneous claims about their connection to lost Old World civilizations. Even if details like the supposed depth of these finds are not trustworthy (likely resulting from simple mixing of stratigraphic contexts), such accounts point to a developing understanding of the temporal depth of Indigenous settlement in the area.

Click the arrows, above, to read exerpts of early archaeological finds from the Daily Delta's Tableaux of New Orleans, 1853.

Of more consequence for contemporary archaeologists are reports of finds of human remains from already-forgotten historic cemeteries beginning in the late-nineteenth century. While such incidental discoveries are not archaeology in the proper sense of the term, they do speak to a growing sense of New Orleans as a city with a deep past, and the contemporary articles occasionally provide important details on those finds.  Such accounts also obviously have pertinence for predicting locations of human remains in the present, and accidental discoveries like them have continued almost to the present day.  However, it would still be many decades before such finds would be treated as historically significant rather than just anomalous, and it would be even longer before there was sustained archaeological attention to the city’s history.

Historical Accounts of Workmen Disturbing Unmarked Cemeteries

Slide the curser between the two historic maps to see the rapid development of the quarter on top of St. Peter Cemetery. On the left hand side is Trudeau's 1801 map showing the boundaries of the "Antiguo" [ancient] Cemetery. On the right hand side is Pilie's 1808 survey of the city showing the names of land owners, with no mention of the historic cemetery.

Both maps are courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection. 

Slide between these two maps to see the urban development around and above St. Louis Cemeteries One and Two. On the left side is Zimpel's (1834) Topographical Map of New Orleans showing the development of the two cemeteries. On the right side is the 1885-87 Sanborn Map mosaic showing a smaller cemetery footprint. 

(Charles Zimpel's (1834) Topographical Map of New Orleans and its Vicinity, Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, The L. Kemper and Leila Moore Williams Founders Collection, 1945313 i-xix and Fire Insurance Map Mosaic stiched together by OldInsuranceMaps.net, sourced from the Library of Congress)