Prairie View A&M University Spotlights

Researchers Collaborate
to Map Slave Cemetery

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For over a century, a patch of land on the northern end of the Prairie View A&M University campus has held the remains of members of the surrounding community and, as researchers have found, that of slaves of the plantations that once stood in Waller County.

PVAMU Public Relations Dr. Davin Wallace of Rice University, far right, works with teachers to study the readings captured by the GPR.

A collaboration between Rice University and PVAMU is shedding light on the secrets held in the old Wyatt Chapel cemetery. Since 2007, a team from Rice University has come to the area using technology to map the terrain of the site. The project is part of a two year grant from Texas Education Quality. Earth Science Professor Dr. Dale Sawyer of Rice University is the principal investigator on the grant.

With a large amount of the brush cleared away, the research team gained access to survey the site with ground penetrating radar (GPR). Dr. Davin Wallace, a Rice University Earth Science lecturer, said GPR shoots radar waves into the ground. Based on return of the waves, researchers can determine if anomalies in the soil are present up to eight feet under the surface. Anomalies signal that the soil has been disturbed at some point in time. The anomalies are marked with flags down to the centimeter. Trenches are also dug to reveal the rock strata, offering insight into the flooding of the nearby Pond Creek.

“In the past, archaeologists have excavated and verified a few graves. I am not sure if this will occur again, but our main contribution is determining where a ‘good’ area could potentially be for an excavation,” Wallace said.

This year, the team researching the site consists of K-12 in service teachers from the Houston Metro area enrolled in an Earth Science course at Rice. The project offers the teachers a chance to gain fieldwork experience to carry out individual research projects.

Dr. Akel Kahera, director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture at PVAMU has high hopes for the site. “The results of the research work will provide valuable information that ultimately will be used to designate this area as a Texas historic site,” he said.

Dr. James Wilson, dean of the Honors Program and associate provost for academic affairs said students in the Honors Program will research the identities of those buried in the cemetery in an effort identify them and learn about their lives.

For both Kahera and Wilson, the project is the perfect embodiment of the University’s mission. “The mission is teaching, research and service. Therefore through integrating these three unique forms of information and pedagogy, a unique perspective can be gathered about this historic site that will promote academic knowledge,” Kahera said.

PVAMU Public Relations

Researchers from Rice University use ground penetrating radar (GPR)
to determine if the soil of the cemetery site has been disturbed.

PVAMU Public Relations

PVAMU Graduate Student Kenneth Grimes, Jr. studies one of the
damaged tombstones in the old Wyatt Chapel Cemetery.

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ABC News Report

History being unearthed in Prairie View

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Rice News Article

History meets science at
Texas historic cemetery
Rice students search for slavery-era
graves at Prairie View cemetery
Jade Boyd

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The physical sciences crossed paths with Texas' cultural history this week when a group of Rice University graduate students took the latest tools of geophysical science into a remote field at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) to search for unmarked graves in one of Texas' few known slave cemeteries.

"They are finding graves that we did not know existed," said Akel Kahera, associate professor of architecture and community development at PVAMU and director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture. "And the beautiful thing about this equipment is that it can give us a reading of the location of these graves, and then we can do further research to try to identify who the people are that may have been buried in these locations."


This is the third year that Kahera has teamed with the students and instructors from Rice's Earth Science 515 course to search for unmarked graves in and around the Wyatt Cemetery on the northern portion of the Prairie View campus.

Prairie View, the second-oldest public institution of higher learning in Texas, was founded in 1876 on 1,000 acres of land that had been part of Alta Vista, one of Texas' largest pre-Civil War plantations. Though there are no written records of a slave burial ground for Alta Vista, oral histories and a few old headstones suggest that the area around the present-day Wyatt Chapel Cemetery served as the slave burial ground for both Alta Vista and Liendo, another large plantation nearby.

Most of the students in the two-week course are science teachers in elementary, junior high and high schools throughout the Houston area. Many have returned for two or three years and say the course pays dividends in the classroom.

TOMMY LAVERGNE A handful of marked graves are located in the area that's believed to contain the remains of pre-Civil War slaves. The marked graves, which date to 1862, include three veterans of the first and second world wars.

Shaun Wegscheid, a teacher at Westchester Academy in Spring Branch Independent School District, who is participating for a second time, said, "It shows students that there's more than just commercialization. There's more than oil. There are other aspects of science that they can really get into if that's what they're looking to do." The students use ground-penetrating radar, GPS and high-tech survey instruments to catalog and map suspected graves. Later, in the classroom, they use the data to create a sophisticated map that PVAMU researchers can augment with archival and historical data. One of the course instructors, Dale Sawyer, professor of Earth science at Rice, said investigating the geology and geography of the area can help reveal clues about the cemetery's history. "We're interested in the geology and the depth of the clay here to tell us something about where we expect burials to be," Sawyer said.

He said a dense layer of clay lies about three feet below the sand in the area, and because the clay is so difficult to dig by hand, most burials were no deeper than 2-3 feet.

The course's lead instructor, Davin Wallace, lecturer in Earth science at Rice, said the ground-penetrating radar lets the class see unusual features down to about 10 feet. It doesn't give a photographic image of what's beneath the surface, so the class uses it on marked graves to see the sort of signal that is returned by a burial as opposed to a tree root or buried stump.

When a suspected grave is located, GPS is used to get a rough fix on the location and flags are placed for follow-up surveys with state-of-the-art laser-ranging devices. "We use the survey equipment because GPS can be off by several meters, and when we find a feature of interest, we want to know exactly where it's at, to within a decimeter," Wallace said. Kahera said the work of the Rice team is vitally important in the documentation of the history of Wyatt Chapel Cemetery. "We love this partnership, and I hope we can continue it," he said.

TOMMY LAVERGNE Ground-penetrating radar can identify unmarked burial sites. From left, graduate student Becky Minzoni, lecturer Davin Wallace and professor Dale Sawyer, all of Earth science, review GPR results.

Sawyer, Kahera and Wallace each said a large measure of the success for the program goes to Alison Henning, a former lecturer in Earth science who founded and led the program at Rice during its first three years.

The class wraps up next week with additional work in the classroom and the field and a final presentation of findings Thursday at the Prairie View A&M archive.

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Fox 26 News Report

Researchers Ensure Dead Are Gone
But Not Forgotten

Ford Atkinson

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HOUSTON - For three years researchers for Rice University and Prairie View A&M have joined together to try to restore the 100-acre Wyatt Chapel Cemetery in Waller County.

They're using a GPR machine to locate the final resting places of slaves and African American military veterans who followed them.

"It sends radar waves into the subsurface. Those radar waves then bounce back up to the transmitter and it records changes essentially in the subsurface," says Rice University researcher Davin Wallace.

So far researchers believe they have found about 100 graves in the cemetery on the northside of the Prairie View campus.

Ironically one gravestone reads "gone, but not forgotten."

Prairie View professor Akel Kahera says researchers hope to turn those words into indisputable truth.

Kahera says "it's important to know who we are, where we come from and where we're going."

Researchers pledge to keep going until each grave site is found and each person buried there receives the dignity they earned in life.

"The least we can do for them after they're gone is to honor their legacy, Kahera says.

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