LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Identifying historic African American gravesites can be tough. Even if the bodies aren’t beneath a building, they could be hidden behind decades of overgrown bush — or worse — entirely underwater.

Students from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) could be the future of discovering and documenting our past.

What You Need To Know

  • Students from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are taking “underwater photogrammetry” lessons to locate slave shipwrecks and potential gravesites

  • Dr. Justin Dunnavant, assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA, teaches his students how to capture video and photos for creating 3D models for an upcoming trip in underwater archaeology and marine biology

  •  Dunnavant says it's history that deserves to be acknowledged

They’re diving into “underwater photogrammetry” lessons.

Their instructor is Dr. Justin Dunnavant, assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA.

“I’ve been doing archaeology on land and underwater for probably like the last 20 years now,” he said. “Exploring everything, from shipwrecks, to World War II wrecks, to plantation sites on land, to Buffalo Soldier sites as well.”

Dunnavant teaches his students how to capture video and photos for creating 3D models for an upcoming trip in underwater archaeology and marine biology.

He said due to development, there’s a lot to discover, especially underwater.

“There’s also a number of construction projects, building of highways, dams, rivers and river management projects. All of those have altered the landscape a bit. We still don’t know what all is out there,” he said.

But he says it’s critical that we find out.

“In doing underwater archaeology, we acknowledge the fact that literally millions of people died during The Middle Passage on their way from Africa to the Americas,” Dunnavant said. “And so, when we do underwater archaeology specifically around slave shipwrecks, we try to acknowledge the fact that these wrecks are not only ships and vessels, but also potential burial sites and gravesites.”

History, he says, deserves to be acknowledged.

“I tell people it’s a continuation of enslavement in certain ways. The idea that people were essentially valued based off of their ability to labor, or their ability not to labor, continues in the afterlife, and as these areas or these lands become valuable for other purposes, or as descendants in these communities move on, they tend to be forgotten or in some cases they’re intentionally erased, and that leads to a whole series of historical facts that we need to grapple with coming into the 21st century,” Dunnavant said.