African American Burial Grounds

Team Leadership: Annicia Streete, Brendan Harmon, and Nicholas Serrano.

Team: Carlos Roman, Cecil Chapman, Christos Baos, Graham Hargis, Joseph Brooks, etc.

Funding: National Park Service Preservation Technology and Training Grant & Architecture Research Centers Consortium’s Research Incentive Award

This project aims to document African American burial grounds in the Louisiana River Parishes. The Louisiana River Parishes are scattered with hundreds of African American cemeteries dating back to the antebellum period when plantations lined both sides of the Mississippi River. This history of environmental racism continued into the 20th century as the region was favored for hazardous petrochemical production facilities. Today these cultural landscapes are threatened by industrial expansion, climate change, missing land-tenure records, and dwindling populations of descendant communities. Our team is 3D scanning burial grounds and compiling a database of interactive, publicly accessible digital models to preserve the record of these cultural landscapes. The project leads are Annicia Streete, Brendan Harmon, and Nicholas Serrano. This research is funded by a National Park Service Preservation Technology and Training Grant. This project is supported by the LSU Center for GeoInformatics and the LSU Coastal Ecosystem Design Studio. The point clouds are released under the Creative Commons Zero public domain dedication.