NEW YORK — The government considers the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan the most important historic urban archaeological project in the United States. But most people don’t know why.
Now, they can learn at a visitor center that opened Saturday at the site, where about 15,000 Africans were buried, many of them slaves. In the 1600s, they toiled for the Dutch colonizers of New Amsterdam, which became New York under the English.
Tara Morrison, the site’s superintendent, says the ethnic Africans helped make New York the nation’s commercial capital. They built roads and worked in construction and farming.
They were buried outside the city, a walk from today’s Wall Street. Some remains were found in 1991 during construction of a government building. The Associated Press
