D.C. Park's Cemetery history unearthed.

In a community park that adjoins Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo grounds, Howard University students are learning from their biological anthropology professor about the land. But it's not quite landscaping--they're researching the human remains a few feet below the grass and shrubbery.

The Washington Post reports that during the preliminary work to shore up a wall in Walter C. Pierce Community Park, artifacts from the past began to surface from pits city contractors were digging. Construction was halted at the park after lengthy negotiations with the community.

According to Mark E. Mack, the anthropology professor, the park and nearby land was once the Colored Union Benevolent Association cemetery, resting place of working class Washington African-Americans. Around 1889, the city ordered the cemetery closed because of "marshy soil." Poor record-keeping, swaths of land changing hands and general negligence turned a resting place for Washington's dead into transient public ground mistakenly converted to a park.

The Howard students now work several days a week locating and documenting grave sites and artifacts within cordoned-off squares. They plan to create a map and archive descriptions of the artifacts.

Mack says the group will likely finish its surveying in late spring and will offer suggestions as to the future of the site in addition to its findings.

The discovery of the cemetery has been compared to the 1991 discovery of an 18th-century African-American cemetery in New York City. Mack was the laboratory director for the resulting effort: the New York African Burial Ground Project.