Tori Sutera, AJ Humenik, Emily Papagiannis, and Lucas Gonzalez were awarded grants to participate in the 2024 Native American and Indigenous Studies field school run by MSU’s NAIS program. Natalia Orlovski used her Bigel award to be part of a Global Treks and Adventures internship program in Iceland where she researched and visited several amazing cultural and heritage sites. Ellie Paschalis was able to travel to the Basque country in Spain to participate in the Aditu Archaeological Field School which is focused on the recovery and study of human remains from a medieval-period ossuary. Khara Brown also traveled for an archeological field at James Madison’s Montpelier, the planation of America’s fourth president. Khara’s program studied and excavated at the site to better understand the enslaved community who labored and sustain the plantation in the 19th century.

The student reports were outstanding and clearly demonstrated the special opportunities available to Anthropology students thanks to their access to the Bigel scholarship fund.

Khara Brown’s paper is a comparison between three free African American settlements founded in the 1800s. Seneca Village was a black community established in Manhattan in the 1820s and then razed in 1857 due the construction of Central Park. The Closter Mountain Community (aka Skunk Hollow) was established in 1806 by formerly enslaved man named Jack Earnest. The community was located in what is now Palisades Park near the NY-NJ border. Finally, Dunkerhook, was a community founded by formerly enslaved men and woman in the 1830s in Paramus, NJ. Each site has been excavated and studied by archaeologists but a comparison of the findings have never been done before.

Emily Papagiannis’ paper was an analysis of data from the census and cemetery records for the Dunkerhook community. The purpose of her study was to determine if the burial sites of all of the Dunkerhook residents documented by the census were known and where they are located. This accounting will help to understand the community networks Dunkerook people would have developed but also to know the likelihood that any burials still remain in the community, perhaps associated with the site of the AME Zion church that once stood on Dunkerhook Road.

Both papers were very well-received and the students handled the Q&A like pros!

These students included junior Farrah Fornarotto, senior David Villa, and recent graduate Will Williams. Their papers, along with others by Prof Chris Matthews and Sasha Thompson (a student at Hunter College) focused on various aspects of the story of the historic African American Dunkerhook community who lived in Paramus, NJ during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Dr. Matthews has been a project co-coordinator of the Dunkerhook project since 2019. This project led an archaeological field school in Summer 2021 and a lab-based research experience in Summer 2022, MSU students formed the core of the research teams during both summer research initiatives.

The Dunkerhook community was founded by formerly enslaved individuals in the 1830s. The community grew to be a place where African American people and culture thrived for decades. The Dunkerhook Archaeological Survey aims to collect and interpret the history of this community through research in local archives as well as excavations. To this end, the students presented papers on historic maps and censuses, historic fruit jars used for home canning, and household ceramics reflecting unique cultural expressions.

The research reports prepared by the students will be compiled into a detailed technical report documenting the various threads of research undertaken to bring the story of the Dunkerhook community to light.

Family names analyzed in the paper, such as the Terhunes, Zabriskies, and Hoppers, maintained close intragroup business and family connections. One theory proposed by Williams suggests that enslaved individuals’ labor contributed to the families’ social and economic position by providing seasonal or temporary forced labor when community members required it. The white families’ mutual familiarity with the enslaved persons produced a surveillance network whose power model has similarities to the panopticon carceral system devised by Jeremy Bentham. The affective response to this power structure is possibly one factor limiting where emancipated African Americans established their homes.

Will Wiliams at the Dunkerhook site

The timing of the construction of two Jersey Dutch buildings along Dunkerhook Road – – and the building of a new Dutch community church in Paramus coincides with a temporary influx of enslaved labor exploited by the Zabriskie family, which is recorded in church documents. The article further speculates that the enslaved were not unskilled, and there is the possibility that some labor was used in community building projects. This perspective provides an alternate view of how enslaved persons were perceived and their roles in the early days of the American republic.

The article was published in the peer-reviewed journal, New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and can be downloaded .

Williams is currently an Archaeology Ph.D. student (2029) at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The African American Dunkerhook community was founded in the early 1800s by formerly enslaved men and women and remained in place until the early 20th century. At its peak the community consisted of six households consisting of more than 40 individuals. They also established an AME Zion church. Men worked on surrounding farms as laborers as well as drivers and coachmen for wealthier whites. Women were often laundresses, though Catherine Bennett’s obituary in 1911 noted that she was “a midwife who assisted at least 650 births for both black and white families … She read widely and was knowledgeable of not only medicine, but of agriculture, horticulture, and politics.”

Students excavated test pits and recovered thousands of artifacts. Exciting finds included pottery shards, animal bones, medicine bottles, marbles, slate pencils, brass buttons, horseshoes, a cow bell, a nursing bottle, an inkwell, a lock, and more than twenty small processed cheese containers that were likely repurposed to store something—perhaps medicine or baby food. These materials are currently being analyzed in the lab of the Center for Heritage and Archaeological Studies at ¾«Æ·³ÉÈ˸£ÀûÔÚÏß.

Students also did an initial survey of sections of the Dunkerhook Area of Saddle River Park. Artifacts recovered from these tests indicate that Native Americans occupied this area during what archaeologists call the Archaic era about 2000 years ago. Consultation with members of the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape nation, whose ancestral land includes the Paramus area, has led to new relationships and collaborations.

Field school students and staff were invited to visit with Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann and Clan Mother Micheline Picaro to learn more about their history and struggle to preserve their heritage. Documenting Ceremonial Stone Landscapes has become a new focus for the team.

Small patent medicine bottle from the turn of the 20th century photographed in situ.

MSU archaeological field school students and staff in front of a large stone feature that is part of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation’s Ceremonial Stone Landscape. Turtle Clan mother Micheline Picaro is second from the right.

MSU archaeology students Dangelis Soto and Will Williams recording a unit profile at the Dunkerhook site.

Mid-19th-century ceramic ink well recovered at Dunkerhook.

End of the field school group photo. Everyone is wearing the Dunkerhook Field School t-shirt designed by the students.

The t-shirt design for the Dunkerhook field school noting the theme of exposing erasure.

A collaborative team, including Christopher N. Matthews, professor in the Department of Anthropology, has been working to change that.

A historical and archaeological study of the long-standing community in the Bethel-Christian Avenue-Laurel Hill Historic District began in 2009. This summer, Matthews, along with two students, Alexis Alemy and Sophia Hudzik, released an interactive map as a dynamic and informative way to present their discoveries.

°ä²¹±ô±ô±ð»åÌý, this Digital Humanities initiative is produced on the ArcGIS ‘‘ platform created by ESRI. It features photos, historical documents, details on excavation finds, coordinates embedded in a Google Earth map, and more.

“Story maps can be of vital use to archaeologists and other researchers by providing a low cost, relatively easy way to make scholarship available to the public in an accessible and exciting online format,” wrote Alemy and Hudzik in an article about the project on theÌý·É±ð²ú²õ¾±³Ù±ð.

The trio also wrote about the project for  published on the Society for American Archaeology’s Ìý²õ¾±³Ù±ð.

A Long Time Coming

Called “A Long Time Coming,” the study of the Bethel-Christian Avenue-Laurel Hill Historic District is a collaborative effort supported by community members, researchers and students associated with Higher Ground Intercultural and Heritage Association, Inc., ¾«Æ·³ÉÈ˸£ÀûÔÚÏß University, Hofstra University, and Education Works. Key leadership includes Robert Lewis (Higher Ground), Chris Matthews, and Judith Burgess (Education Works).

As part of the study, Matthews led excavations at two sites: Jacob and Hannah Hart home and the Silas Tobias home. The well-preserved Hart site was excavated in 2011 and 2015. It yielded finds including a quartz lithic tool, a wide range of buttons, a straight pin, a thimble, and a sewing oil bottle fragment. Descendants of the homeowners still live in and around Setauket.

Excavation of the Tobias site in 2015 yielded more than 15,000 artifacts including 500 quartz tools and flakes from stone tool making and use as well as everyday materials such as shards from dishes, bottles, and windows, as well as personal items like clay tobacco pipe fragments and shoe parts.

Researchers also gathered materials from historical archives and conducting oral histories.

Project background: Past and future
The ground-breaking project has been written about multiple times in the press with articles including: “,,, and.

As noted above, the Montclair students wrote about the Counter-Map project for two online publications. They also submitted the project to a storymap contest. Matthews has published findings from the excavations in scholarly publications and is working on a book-length manuscript.

The Higher Ground Intercultural and Heritage Association is working with Historical New York Research Associates to create a detailed Cultural Resource Survey documenting the significance of dozens of local neighborhood landmarks. It’s to support a pending application to add the Bethel-Christian Avenue sites to the National Register for Historic Places.

Her Master’s thesis is entitled, “A Comparative Study of African American Identity Creation in Antebellum New Jersey,” in which she analyzed the structuralized racism and community progression of the 19th-century African American community of Fair Haven, N.J.

Now at 24 years old, she is working as a field and lab technician for Hunter Research, Inc., a historical consulting company that is based in Trenton, New Jersey.