Destruction of the Vaults

Cypress Grove’s vaults were not sold with any guarantee of perpetual care by the cemetery. Consequently, it was the responsibility of the families to maintain their own vaults. It is evident that this maintenance did not always occur. Due to an apparent lack of upkeep, the condition of many of the eastern vaults deteriorated over a 50- to 100-year period. By the 1940s, the vaults’ condition had become so derelict that many of the marble crypt fronts containing decedents’ names had fallen and shattered. The underlying brick constructions behind the marble façades deteriorated and became unstable, exacerbated by many large trees that had germinated and grown to full size along the uppermost position of the wall vaults. The root systems navigated their way from the top stories through the tombs and into the ground below, further and substantially weakening the vaults’ structural integrity. Portions of the wall vaults, including those analyzed in this research, were condemned by the New Orleans Health Department and the Department of Building Inspection in 1949 (Times-Picayune [New Orleans, Louisana; TP] 7 August 1949:73; Nick Black to Jerry Sullivan, personal communication, February 12, 2024, Louisiana Cemetery Board Files [LCBF], Metairie, Louisiana). A 1949 plan to remove the existing human remains and demolish the structures was further bolstered by accounts of vandalism and desecration (Nick Black to Jerry Sullivan, personal communication, February 12, 2024, p. 5, LCBF, Metairie, Louisiana).

Following public notice in 1949, the Association offered removal and reinterment of individuals at no expense (TP 7 August 1949:73); the exact number and names of those who took advantage of this removal offering (if any) are unknown. To address immediate safety concerns and to deter additional vandalism, the Association sealed existing vault fronts with concrete (Nick Black to Jerry Sullivan, personal communication, February 12, 2024, p. 5, LCBF, Metairie, Louisiana). The western vaults were stabilized in the late twentieth century, but maintenance efforts of the vaults along the eastern wall were deferred indefinitely. Between the 1949 condemnation and the 2020s, the condition of the eastern wall vaults continued to worsen. However, maintenance and upkeep costs elsewhere in the cemetery made the long-planned demolition impossible. By the 2020s, the structures were in an even more advanced state of disrepair (Figures 4 and 5), and safety concerns regarding a possible collapse forced the cemetery operators to act in 2023.

Figure 5.

Image of the vaults during demolition. Image courtesy of Nick Black. (Color online)

No work on the eastern vaults occurred until early 2023, when the Association decided to demolish a large stretch of the wall vaults separating Cypress Grove from Charity #1. During this demolition, a local resident raised concerns to the state regulator, the Louisiana Cemetery Board (LCB), alleging that Cypress Grove was breaking the law and illegally destroying existing tombs. This resident’s concerns led to the notification of two authors (Seidemann and Halling) who were, at the time, employees of the State of Louisiana charged with managing cemetery and human-remains problems. However, for reasons enumerated and analyzed below, no laws were violated. Given that this portion of the cemetery had been condemned and proper notice of the proposed demolition was published in 1949 and again in 2021, all legal requirements had been met. One positive consequence of this inquiry was a dialogue with both the cemetery operators and descendants of those entombed in the cemetery about the possibility of conducting not only the salvage work but also research discussed here and elsewhere. Meaningful and substantive engagement with the descendant community—and their freely given permission to conduct this work—was a clear prerequisite for this work and its success (see, e.g., Blakey Reference Blakey2010; Davidson and Brandon Reference Davidson, Brandon, Skeates, McDavid and Carman2012; Warner-Smith et al. Reference Warner-Smith, Lauren, Hosek and Ellis2026).

Louisiana Cemetery Laws

Under Louisiana law, cemetery operators may take unilateral action to repair grave spaces that have fallen into ruin. Specifically, La. R.S. 8:308, La. R.S. 8:903, and La. R.S. 8:903.1—all of which are enforced by the LCB—provide that grave spaces that are in disrepair and have received no attention from the descendants may be repaired and maintained by the cemetery operator. These laws provide authority for such repairs to be done following a lapse of 10–25 years of maintenance and diligent efforts by the cemetery operator to notify the interment right owners. The notice required is, as was done here, by advertisement in the official local newspaper of record. Importantly, because Cypress Grove is an active cemetery, these are the only laws that apply. The site is not subject to the protections of the Louisiana Unmarked Human Burial Sites Preservation Act or the Louisiana Historic Cemetery Preservation Act—laws enforced by the state archaeologist.

Taken together, La. R.S. 8:308 and 8:903 provide the following: although cemetery owners can make repairs to deteriorating grave spaces on their property, they are prohibited from destroying those spaces. Contrarily, wall vaults are treated differently from grave spaces under Louisiana law; that is, the destruction of wall vaults is not prohibited. Based on this demolition exception, the wall vaults at Cypress Grove—originally slated for demolition in the 1940s—were still able to be destroyed following the passage of the Louisiana Cemetery Act (1974; Louisiana Cemetery Board 2024). Before repair or demolition, the law (La. R.S. 8:903.1) requires a public notice process, even if the lineal descendants cannot be identified. The law mandates the posting of physical notices at the cemetery and publication in the official local newspaper (La. R.S. 8:903.1), both of which, for Cypress Grove, were done in 1949 and 2021. The notice allows any interested parties to contest the cemetery operator’s plans for major repairs or demolition and to undertake necessary repairs themselves.

The 1949 notices and additional updated notices published in 2021 allowed Cypress Grove to undertake the slated demolitions without running afoul of the law. In the nearly 75 years between the original 1949 publication and the 2023 demolitions, there is no record of any descendant or other interested party objecting to the demolition. As though underscoring the need for action, during the state’s investigation into whether the cemetery had broken any laws by tearing down the vaults, a large piece of the original back wall collapsed into the adjacent Charity #1. Ultimately, the state closed its investigation into the matter, finding that the cemetery was legally compliant, despite the work being done in neither an archaeologically ethical nor sound manner.

Ethics Considerations

Although remaining within the letter of the law, the treatment of the human remains (something that the state and this research team only became aware of after the fact) was deficient. As related by the cemetery’s sexton, any remains and material culture present in the vaults were scraped out with hand tools into individually labeled black garbage bags (Nick Black to Jerry Sullivan, personal communication, February 12, 2024, LCBF, Metairie, Louisiana). The sexton’s staff then visually checked each vault, collected any remaining skeletal elements and associated material culture, and added them to the bag corresponding with that particular vault. The vault bags were piled into an on-site shipping container for later reinterment in a bespoke monument. Vaults that had collapsed downward into each other were emptied into joint garbage bags. In this region, it was common practice for these types of vaults to be reused by families or sold to new occupants following a lack of payment (DP 27 January 1850:3). These practices, combined with the internal vault collapses and the cemetery staff’s removal techniques led to extreme fragmentation and commingling of these individuals’ remains (Baustian et al. Reference Baustian, Garcia-Putnam, Allen, Seidemann, Halling, Holland and Fox2025, Reference Baustian, Garcia-Putnam, Seidemann, Halling, Allen, Boutte and Moran2026).

Determining an appropriate course of action for managing these remains became an acute issue. Following the disentombment, our first goal was to engage with the descendant community to understand whether there was interest among the descendants in learning about their ancestors through their physical remains and material culture or if rapid reburial was to be prioritized. Cypress Grove, as an operating benevolent association, is run and staffed by descendants of those buried there, making the identification of representative community members a simple exercise. However, given the state of the remains and a lack of vault façades or other critical records, there may be no way to systematically connect the remains to individual living descendants. In this way, the Cypress Grove descendant community is akin to Warner-Smith and colleagues’ (Reference Warner-Smith, Lauren, Hosek and Ellis2026) 1928 Hurricane Victims descendant community and may best be described as a “community of care.” That said, the operator families designated a group of three descendants to represent their interests in such matters, with whom two authors (Seidemann and Halling) met in 2024. These descendants claimed direct lineage from the people whose remains had been disturbed. It is believed that the descendants represent a range of the decedent community, indicative of the diversity of the historic middle-class New Orleanians.

The representative descendants expressed interest in learning from the remains and artifacts but had three stipulations: (1) no promotion of the project to the media; they had no opposition to the information learned being communicated to them in the form of reports or presented in academic circles, but they did not want a public exposé of the work; (2) no destructive testing/sampling of the remains; and (3) completion of the analysis before construction was finished on the monument to allow for immediate reentombment. We also set clear expectations by informing the descendants that this work would likely never be able to identify individual people from the remains, but that they could get a collective sense of these individuals’ lives through the proposed demographic, dental, paleopathological, and material culture analyses. In this regard, we sought—as Lans (Reference Lans2021:134) has characterized it—to accomplish a “fleshing-in” of these peoples’ ancestors in order to “reconstitute at least part of their lives by putting a narrative back together.” The descendants were satisfied with this outcome.

In addition to engaging with the descendant community and seeking their guidance, archaeological ethics played a considerable role in developing this project. For this reason, we turned to the Society for American Archaeology’s Principles of Archaeological Ethics, which advises that we, as archaeologists, serve as good stewards of the past (Society for American Archaeology 2024). To accomplish this task, under the Register for Professional Archaeologists (RPA) Code of Ethics rule 3.3 (Register of Professional Archaeologists [RPA] 2025:5), we sought to “includ[e] descendant communities [and] stakeholders.” Furthermore, under RPA ethical rules 1.1 (RPA 2025:2) and 3.10 (RPA 2025:6), all applicable laws had to be observed throughout the work and analysis at the site and in the “lab.” Because the Unmarked Burials Act did not apply to this situation, the entire effort was undertaken under the watchful eye of the LCB; no other laws applied to this situation.

Although it should be readily apparent to bioarchaeological practitioners that these commingled and fragmented remains deserve a respectful and efficient final disposition, we believe that they were owed more than that. In accordance with the wishes of the descendant community, we also felt compelled to de-commingle these individuals and understand their lives and histories to understand the group’s basic demographic profile and their lived experiences through their skeletal and dental remains, before their reentombment en masse furthered their fragmentation and commingling. Moreover, it seemed to us to be a double insult that these individuals were not only treated ignominiously during their disentombments but then anonymously returned to a new monument. In a case like this, archaeology’s guiding codes of ethics are useful, but we argue that archaeologists have the ability and therefore the duty to do some good—rather than just doing no harm—through their work.

Archaeological and Bioarchaeological Triage

Given the complexities of the assemblage and the time constraints posed by the cemetery (i.e., active construction of the new mausoleum to house these individuals, with no clear timetable for their reentombment), we developed a triage-based field methodology for rapidly assessing each vault bag and prioritizing remains for further analysis. The ultimate goals of this work were (1) respectful reentombment of these individuals (first and foremost) and (2) exploration of their lives and deaths to develop a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century middle-class lifeways in New Orleans. Given that almost no records exist for this section of the cemetery, osteological and archaeological analyses offer a unique opportunity to uncover this information.

In order for this work to progress efficiently, there was a need for a basic decision-making tree and task hierarchy. Three principal investigators (authors Seidemann, Halling, and Garcia-Putnam) oversaw fieldwork and laboratory planning and execution, consultation with the LCB and the descendant community, and other project-level decisions. The principal investigators brought a suite of specialists on board for the fieldwork and laboratory analyses, each with expertise in various aspects of the work, including the analyses of commingled remains and MNI, dental remains, and historic material culture. Garcia-Putnam directed the various project specialists and students in the fieldwork and laboratory analyses; the project specialists directed their own data collection and research avenues within their purviews. Funds for the work were drawn from an individual faculty member’s (Alex Garcia-Putnam) university research funds and internal university grants. Given the truncated timeline of this work, we applied for no major grants.

We accessed the skeletal and dental assemblages and associated artifacts after cemetery staff had securely and discretely stored them in an on-site container for approximately a year. Given the condensation and moisture build-up in most of the plastic bags over that period, each set of remains was laid out on a tarp for at least 30 minutes to dry. Following drying, the remains were sorted on the tarp and prepared for screening. Even though the remains had been entombed aboveground, the plastic bags contained not just bones and material culture (including coffin or other burial material) but also all of the decomposed detritus—vegetation, small fauna, and likely human organic material—that had accumulated in each vault over a century or more. All screening (¼-inch mesh screens) took place over tarps, and all material that went through screens was bagged separately to ensure that all human remains, irrespective of size, were retained for reburial. During screening, all remains were sorted into various paper bags. These included (1) material culture; (2) subadult remains; (3) elements with clear pathological lesions present; and (4) all elements that were complete and useful for osteological-sex, age-at-death, or ancestry estimation; and elements that were useful for estimating the MNI; within this subset, dentition was subsequently partitioned for separate analyses. The remaining small fragments of bone that did not fall into one of the above categories were labeled, bagged separately, and immediately boxed for reburial. Given the scale of the assemblage and the timetable, this prioritization was necessary for subsequent efficient analyses. For a detailed examination of these methodologies, see Baustian and colleagues’ (Reference Baustian, Garcia-Putnam, Allen, Seidemann, Halling, Holland and Fox2025) work on this subject.

The cemetery was unable to make progress on the mausoleum construction from the summer of 2024 to the winter of 2025, and it did not appear that the construction would be ready to receive the reentombments for several months. During this delay, the remains were curated in paper bags and boxes at the LCB office and at an off-site warehouse. The availability of these spaces meant that the remains were secured and maintained in climate-controlled facilities. In the winter of 2025, we conducted the laboratory analysis phase of this project. Specialized data forms allowed for efficient recordation of the elements in each bag and for the determination of each contexts’ MNI. Analysis of MNI followed standard protocols (Adams and Konigsberg Reference Adams, Konigsberg, Adams and Byrd2008; Osterholtz et al. Reference Osterholtz, Baustian and Martin2014) for each vault context, and their individual results were added together for a complete most likely number of individuals (MLNI; Baustian et al. Reference Baustian, Garcia-Putnam, Allen, Seidemann, Halling, Holland and Fox2025). Given the fragmentary and commingled nature of the collection, basic standard nonmetric data collection protocols to assess age at death and osteological sex were used when possible, and summary demographic information was recorded for each context (Buikstra and Ubelaker Reference Buikstra and Ubelaker1994).

Given the methodological (let alone ethical) challenges of ancestry estimation from fragmentary contexts, ancestry estimation was rarely conducted in this assemblage. However, when complete crania were present, macromorphoscopic traits were recorded, and ancestry was estimated following Plemons and Hefner (Reference Plemons and Hefner2016). Future analyses using dentition and other skeletal traits and metrics may provide more insight into the biogeographical ancestry of these individuals. All observed pathological conditions were described, scored when applicable, and photographed following standard protocols (Buikstra Reference Buikstra2019; Buikstra and Ubelaker Reference Buikstra and Ubelaker1994; Waldron Reference Waldron2021). All demographic analyses presented here are for the adult individuals in the assemblage. The interpretations of the dental, pathological, material culture, and subadult datasets are ongoing and will be the subject of subsequent manuscripts.

The completed analysis of the commingled assemblage resulted in an MNI of 331 adults (using the left talus) and an MLNI of 745 adults (Baustian et al. Reference Baustian, Garcia-Putnam, Allen, Seidemann, Halling, Holland and Fox2025). The mostly subdivided and separate vaults presented a favorable scenario for calculation of MLNI, which was assessed for each individual vault using whichever element was most represented, in addition to any opposite side of a bilateral element that differed enough to reasonably be associated with one or more additional individuals (Baustian et al. Reference Baustian, Garcia-Putnam, Allen, Seidemann, Halling, Holland and Fox2025). The extreme fragmentation of skeletal elements prevented use of larger bones in much of the analysis, and only a few elements could contribute information about osteological sex and age at death, accounting for only a small portion of the assemblage. Initial demographic assessment of this assemblage is presented by Baustian and colleagues (Reference Baustian, Garcia-Putnam, Allen, Seidemann, Halling, Holland and Fox2025) and summarized here in Table 1.

Table 1.

Basic Demography of Cypress Grove Human Remains.

Table 1 Long description

Demographic indicators are listed with counts in the column labeled, N, and notes where provided. MNI has a count of 331, with the note, Left talus used for calculation. MLNI has a count of 745, with the note, Most numerous element per vault used for calculation, and it includes 44 isolated individuals represented by more complete skeletons. Under Sex, Male or Probable Male has a count of 104 and Female or Probable Female has a count of 88. Under Age, General Adult has a count of 637, with the note, General development available for most individuals, indicating age over 18 years.

Conclusions and Steps Forward

The cemetery’s progress on the monument has continued slowly and, as of this writing, remains incomplete. This allowed for continued subadult and material culture analyses through October 2025. With data collection now complete, the skeletal remains and material culture have been organized and returned to Cypress Grove for reburial. Work is now underway to present the results of our analyses of the dental, paleopathological, demographic, subadult datasets, and material-culture analyses within historical and biocultural contexts. Because of the large amount of nondestructive data gathered, its research potential—even following reentombment—is substantial. The data will first be used to fulfill the wishes of the descendant community by providing a glimpse of the lives and deaths of their ancestors. Secondarily, these deceased individuals will shed light onto what it meant to be “middle class” in the late nineteenth-century urban southern United States. Because of this opportunity, a substantial skeletal dataset now exists for both inter- and intrasample comparison.

This effort represents a positive and functional example of landowner, community, and archaeological cooperation, with the goal of undertaking ethically guided and legally compliant analysis of a disturbed cemetery. Once archaeologists became involved, the work was done in strict compliance with the applicable law and adherence to ethical principles. However, none of this work could have or would have been undertaken without the consent of the descendant community and the property owner. This consent was freely obtained and given. The outcome of this complex situation is useful as guidance in future projects facing commingling or cemetery disrepair, and/or in efforts to promote the value of descendant-community engagement in cemetery protections. Opportunities such as this one in Cypress Grove are increasing in frequency as more burial sites are discovered during development around the United States (e.g., Leader et al. Reference Leader, Moran, Beatrice, Dhody and Veit2022). The opportunities that are presented by such instances highlight the importance of aligning the law, ethical principles, community interests, and archaeological methods in salvage bioarchaeology. In this particular case, those planets aligned.