My name is Olivia, and I spent the summer of 2024 in Jackson, Mississippi completing an archeological field school. Asylum Hill is thought to be the largest bioarchaeological site in the United States, with over 6,000 graves lost to time on the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. These are the bodies of individuals who died at the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum between 1855-1935. Although the graves were once marked with wooden signs, those markers have rotted away, leaving stretches of unbroken, unassuming land in the middle of the hospital campus.
At the field school, I practiced many skills crucial to my development as a bioarchaeologist. I identified bones and different pathologies, I learned different digging techniques for different settings, I got really good at pedestaling artifacts, and I even met with descendant communities. I learned about dental morphology techniques and the importance of nuance in ancestry and sex estimation–while I have read these subjects in textbooks on Duke campus, it was invaluable to experience it first-hand while covered in Yazoo clay drying in the Mississippi sun. Above all, I learned that writing about bioarchaeological projects is a lot harder than it sounds. Like all science communication, there are so many ethical stakeholders to consider–but unlike most science communication, the people who are perhaps most affected by my words have been deceased for over 100 years.
While I can’t talk about the specifics of the project, I can divulge personal anecdotes from my time in Jackson. The other students at the field school were some of my most valuable teachers, since we all came from different backgrounds and experience in archaeology. We went out to eat on many occasions (barbecue, mostly; I was in Mississippi, after all), and soon we were comfortable enough to explore the city together. We spent hours in the Mississippi Museum of History, where we connected our inferred history of the Asylum with the deep-rooted racism of a nineteenth-century Jackson. We then went to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum (located just next door) and the Mississippi Museum of Art. Together with the field school program, we visited the Vicksburg Civil War Cemetery and got real hands-on learning about American funerary trends over time. We even visited the modern-day Mississippi State Hospital, which was the destination of Asylum patients after the original facility closed in 1935. Not only did my experience in Jackson challenge traditional views about mental health patients, but it reinforced the impact slavery and the Civil War had (and continues to have) on the deep South.
Classical Studies
