SCA Proceedings, Volume 26 (2012) Goldstein, p. 234 THE CEMETERY AT FORT ROSS: WHAT DOES IT TELL US ABOUT THOSE WHO LIVED THERE? LYNNE GOLDSTEIN MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY From 1990 to 1992, I designed and directed the excavation of the historic Russian cemetery at Fort Ross in northern California (CA-SON-1876H). The questions the research posed included: 1) Where was the cemetery, and what was its extent? 2) Who was buried in the cemetery? 3) What does the structure and nature of the cemetery tell us about the inhabitants of the Colony and their relationships to this new location? This paper reviews the data collected, particularly information gained from the cemetery excavations. Unfortunately, bone preservation was extremely poor, and determination of individual biological details was almost impossible. We did find the cemetery, determined who was buried there in a general sense and in terms of grave details, and concluded that the Russians were conservative in their mortuary practices and tended toward a focus on the community rather than individual relationships. About 20 years ago, I designed and directed the excavation of the Russian Orthodox cemetery at Fort Ross (SON-1876H) in northern California (Figure 1). At the time, one of my Ph.D. students, Sannie Osborn, wanted to focus her dissertation on mortuary practices in a frontier setting, and was specifically interested in Russian settlements and in Fort Ross. The key question for Osborn (1997) and for my own work at Fort Ross was: “What happens to prescribed customs of funeral behavior when certain members of a society are removed from the familiar surroundings of family, friends, and church, and relocated to a frontier outpost such as the Russian colony at Fort Ross?” Osborn’s dissertation (1997) primarily focused on archival materials from the colony and the Russian American Company, as well as information from the first season of fieldwork, but the location and complete excavation of the cemetery were critical to understand the articulation of the records with the material remains. The Russian settlement at Ross was an isolated location with a multiethnic population (Farris 1989; Gibson 1976; Lightfoot et al. 1998). In such a context, how strictly would Russian Orthodox canon and rules be followed? When the project began, the precise character of the cemetery was unknown, in terms of its exact location, number of graves, or extent of the site. There was general agreement that the main cemetery was located across Fort Ross Creek from the fort, in view of the chapel, as directed by church canon. However, the cemetery in that location may not account for all burials, since we know that at least two individuals were recovered further north. The two outliers appear to be isolated burials, one perhaps interred early in the life of the colony (Schulz 1972), and the other later. It may be that the more recent burial was buried outside the cemetery because the individual was not Russian Orthodox or not associated with the community (Sandra Hollimon, personal communication 2010). CEMETERY COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE Initially, the informed estimate of the number of possible burials was in the neighborhood of 50- 75. This estimate was based primarily on descriptions of the cemetery made by Ernest Rufus, who leased Ross with a partner in 1845 (Hasse 1952:25). Rufus’ description indicates that there were never more than 50 graves in the cemetery, but we excavated a total of 135 graves. What accounts for this large difference? The disconnect between the number expected and the number recovered may simply be an issue of preservation; the wooden markers used to mark graves were not stable, and they did disintegrate. In addition, Rufus and other early visitors may not have considered the possibility of a marker being gone, of a grave not having a marker, or of one marker indicating more than one grave. Rufus also may only have examined one portion of the cemetery, since the extent of the site is not clearly indicated in his description.