History Is Moved, One Skeleton at a Time

Mark Jacobs removes remains from a Fairfax County cemetery. (By Charles Rinehart -- The Louis Berger Group)

As I watched Mark Jacobs carefully scrape away at a patch of Fairfax County soil one afternoon this month, a question came to my mind.

What does he want done with his body after he has drawn his last breath?

He thought for a while and then said, "I want to be buried and dug up again."

That would be a fitting end for the 36-year-old archaeologist. He was in a hole six feet below the ground at Little River Turnpike and Guinea Road. The sides of the hole were terraced and ended at the bottom in a hexagon. Protruding from the dirt within that signature coffin shape was a human skeleton: rounded skull, unhinged lower jaw resting on neck bones, a xylophone of ribs, two arms folded low across the abdomen, long femurs that disappeared into the ground.

Traffic sludged along nearby, but all was very quiet just then. A tall, green privacy fence shielded us from view, and a cool calm seemed to emanate from the soil.

Mark works for the Louis Berger Group, the consulting firm charged with disinterring more than 30 bodies from the 19th-century Guinea Road cemetery before the Virginia Department of Transportation widens the intersection. (See yesterday's column for how the cemetery was rediscovered after decades of neglect.)

Mark switched between a trowel and a brush to clear away the dirt and used shears to snip at tree roots that embraced the skeleton. Nearby were other holes, some heartbreakingly small: the burial sites of babies. Archaeologists Zach Anderson and Paul Stanfield worked on their own skeleton. They lifted each bone from the grave, wrapped it in foil, then marked the foil with black ink: left tibia, fibula, patella .

The dirt that was trowled out of the graves was put into buckets, which were emptied atop a chicken-wire screen and sifted. Each bone fragment and coffin nail was retrieved.

"We're going at a slower pace, just to try and get everything," said Charlie Rinehart , the senior archaeologist.

The conditions of the skeletons varied. A few had clumps of hair. Others were crumbling into dust. All of the people were buried so the tops of their heads pointed west. Their sightless eyes faced east and the rising sun.

The archaeologists haven't found much in the way of personal adornment: one hairpin, one button -- two, if you count the button Mark could see peeking between the ribs of the skeleton he was working on.

No shoes, either. "If the wearers were poor, I'm sure the people who were left behind were going to take their shoes," Charlie said.

The archaeologists think the people buried at Guinea Road were poor. They think it is a slave or free black cemetery dating to at least 1851, possibly earlier.

Although the archaeologists and VDOT employees are incredibly respectful -- no one may eat, smoke or listen to the radio while working -- there is an unmistakable air of excitement at the site. A fascinating piece of Fairfax County history is being unearthed.

The locations of the bodies are meticulously recorded. Samples of coffin wood are saved to see if the tree species can be determined. Soil from the abdomen is bagged in case it sheds light on what the people ate. The skeletons are being sent to Radford University's osteology laboratory for study. They will be reinterred at a cemetery just down the Little River Turnpike.

Mark found himself pondering the thought that consumes every archaeologist: What were these long-dead people like when they were alive?

He brushed away some dirt from the skeleton. "The pelvis is too far gone to tell sex," he said. The distinctive brow ridge suggests it was a male -- a small male, but everybody was smaller then.

Only one engraved headstone has been found -- S.A. Williams, died 1851 -- a fact that puzzled Dave Mitchler , the VDOT backhoe operator who unearthed it.

"They were probably richer, or did something important in their life," Charlie said.

The graves of the others may have been marked with just a simple rock. As Charlie said, "They knew who was buried there."

As it turns out, knowledge of the Guinea Road cemetery wasn't really lost. Some people have always known about it. And one of them lives about eight miles away from where Mark scraped at the dirt.

Tomorrow: The living honor the dead.

My e-mail:kellyj@washpost.com