The Search for Unmarked Cemeteries: Case Studies in St. James and St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana

This thesis presents research in St. James and St. John the Baptist Parishes in Louisiana. These two parishes sit in an eighty-five-mile stretch by the Mississippi River that historically contained plantations with enslaved laborers and currently houses petrochemical plants. This study analyzes the development of cultural resource management (CRM) methodologies for identifying unmarked cemeteries. It uses this information to evaluate an environmental justice research group’s open-source database, which proposes a new source for identifying unmarked ancestral cemeteries. The dataset collected and created for this thesis shows that using land anomalies as a methodology in searching for cemeteries as a cultural resource will help lessen disparity when surveying and recording archaeological sites. This thesis solidifies the multifaceted methodologies of archaeology while introducing a newer one intended to better include the public in the Section 106 process.