By THEA RUTHERFORD, Guardian National Correspondent

thea@nasguard.com

The Northern Burial Ground of St. Matthew's Church, an ancient cemetery for blacks and people of color, is as unassuming as any makeshift, gravel parking lot.

Colorful sloops line the 18th Century burial ground's northern, coastal border while the unrelenting flow of East Bay Street traffic marks its southern side. The mixture of rock and sand that paves the burial ground's surface holds secrets that most residents know nothing of.

Yesterday, members of the National Museum of The Bahamas slid the portal to the past open a bit wider, giving the public a view of the possibilities that lay inside — a forgotten burial ground that could connect those outside it with ancestors from centuries past.

An "important thing about researching an area like this is that it ties us historically to Africa because this would have been a place where freed slaves — black people and people of color — were buried," said museum director Andrea Major. "This was their graveyard."

Across the street lay St. Matthew's Church graveyard, once a final resting place for whites only.

An international initiative highlights the significance of the Northern Burial Ground at this particular time. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) commemorates this year as the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by the British Parliament.

Tuesday marked the second of three days of preliminary archaeological investigation by the Antiquities, Monuments and Museums Corporation (AMMC) of the site, which is scheduled to be surveyed by Grace Turner, an archaeology doctoral student at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

AMMC senior archaeologist Michael Pateman explained the procedure for the investigation, which includes the use of a Ground Penetrating Radar — a three-wheeled device resembling a lawn mower that gives images of cross sections of the surface it covers on an attached screen. "This is to help us to see where the cemetery outline may or may not be," explained Pateman.

Chris Taylor of Geo View, who operates the device, said the data collection would take two days. Analysis of the findings will take an additional two days.

The AMMC is not the only group anxious to know where the cemetery's boundaries lie. The ancient resting place also has implications for the Bridge Authority, which has placed a weight scale to regulate heavy duty vehicles that cross the eastern and western bridges within its boundaries. The building where weight scale employees will work is currently being constructed nearby.

If anomalies beneath the ground's surface, or evidence, are found to indicate the presence of grave sites, the Bridge Authority wants to honor those findings.

"If they find out that there are anomalies then we'll have to discuss just how we can relocate the roads to the plan for the weight scale," said Bridge Authority manager Dennis Mackey. "That's the most important thing ... because obviously the number one concern is if it is a grave site we don't want to be in the way [of] those types of investigations."

With concerns about preserving the site comes pride on its discovery. St. Matthew's Church rector Fr. James Moultrie joined members of the AMMC at the press conference to announce the project, noting the significance of the burial ground to the church's history.

The Northern Burial Ground was once administered by St. Matthew's, which at 205 years old is the oldest church building in the country. The church's other two burial grounds — one in the church yard and the other, known as the Centre Burial Ground, at the eastern end of the Eastern Parade — were reserved for whites.

The Northern Burial Ground "is very significant for the church because it tells us about the racial divide, which we already know because the history of St. Matthew's is very much a part of the history of racism in the country," said Moultrie. "There is no question of any racism now because you can find black and white buried together side by side in the cemetery."

Moultrie proudly added that the church was not just a gate-keeper of history, but helped to make history.

The Northern Burial Ground is believed to be as old as the Bethlehem Burial Ground, an old cemetery for blacks at Meeting and Augusta streets where children now swing and slide in the playground built among the cemetery's mossy gravestones. Both burial grounds are remnants of Bahamian history that the AMMC wants preserved for future generations.

This investigation of the Northern Burial Ground "has brought to the forefront all of these things that have been happening in our country that we have let die," said AMMC chairman Davidson Hepburn. "We didn't know anything about what was happening. I passed this graveyard so many times," he said of the Bethlehem Burial Ground. "I never knew [the] significance; and then I learned that this was one as well," he added of the Northern Burial Ground. "It was really an amazing thing."