Field trip...

…to a bona-fide archaeological dig site! There is a small team of archaeologists on the island at the moment who are unearthing the remains of the slaves who were buried here on the island during the mid-1800s. These slaves came directly off the slave ships, and some of them were buried immediately upon assisted disembarkation. You may know that St Helena was a major player in the abolishment of the slave trade. This is apparently the only slave burial site of its sort in the world – they are all first generation slaves. Unfortunately, when work begins on the airport, an access road will need to be built right through Ruperts’ Valley where the graves are, so instead of allowing the earth-moving machines to plough their way through and crush the already-fragile bones, they are being carefully removed, labelled and boxed, and once an osteologist has examined the bones to identify the gender, age and origin of each person, they will be reburied further down the valley. The team has asked for volunteers to help with the dig, and while we haven’t signed up (yet), we were very interested to see what was going on. Since it’s open to the public, and Pam, one of our ex-pat church ladies, was going to be volunteering today, we thought we would pop along and see. The weather was beautifully sunny all morning, although it started raining shortly after lunch when we were thinking about going. The rain was scattered though, so we took our chances and drove off to Ruperts – I dragged Nick in as well! When we arrived, the five people there had just been sitting in one of the vehicles waiting for a break in the weather, which happened more or less as we arrived. It was sobering to see a skeleton in one of the open graves. There were two sets of bones, one larger than the other – possibly a parent and child. Apparently they have found multiple burials where the finger bones were interlocked. I wasn’t permitted to take photos of the bones, but here is a picture of the general site, and a pic of the boys looking into an active grave, which they were in the process of covering over as the rain was starting again. What was so interesting for us was that earlier in the year in school we read through a book called “Archaeologists dig for Clues”, and so we knew a bit of what to expect, and saw one of the teeny little trowels that they use! No shovels here…