I would like Richard Barnes' photographs of the paupers' grave underneath the Palace of the Legion of Honor to be known and remembered. The link below leads you to his photographs but doesn't include his commentary, which I've tried to find online.
https://www.richardbarnes.net/stillrooms-excavations
I'm copying his commentary now from my copy of the book, which does include it.
Exhumations
In 1992, the fine arts museums of San Francisco began the renovation and expansion of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a museum dedicated in 1924 as a memorial to the California dead of World War I, and designed to exhibit and promote European art and culture in San Francisco. Part of the renovation included seismic upgrading, placing load-bearing steel support beams beneath the Corinthian and Ionic columns to reinforce the building. During excavation for the new subterranean galleries, workers began to dig up human bones and the remains of redwood caskets in the courtyard and throughout the museum grounds. What was first thought to be isolated bone scatter has yielded in excess of 750 intact burials from what had been Golden Gate Cemetery.
Along with the burials, the excavation brought to light questionable activity at the beginning of the century. In the late 1890s, the city of San Francisco, in response to rapid expansion and development, passed legislation prohibiting the burial of the dead within city limits. Funds were allocated to disinter the existing graves throughout the city and rebury them in the less-populated regions to the south. It is speculated that Golden Gate Cemetery was in face never relocated, but instead the headstones were simply removed, leaving the burials for future generations to deal with. The find is archaeologically significant, representing the largest post-Gold Rush community site ever excavated. The exhumations included Chinese, French and numerous others from various ethnic and religious backgrounds. An examination of the simple redwood coffins and the burial artifacts found with the dead revealed this cemetery to be a "potter's field," or the final resting place of the very poor. The collective history of many hundreds of people lay forgotten beneath the foundations of the museum for over 70 years.
My interest in the Palace of the Legion of Honor site developed out of work I have been doing over the past fiv years on archaeological excavations in Egypt and Beirut, Lebanon. These and other recent projects have led me to inquire into the relationship between archeology and modern development, between past cultures and the way they are preserved, analyzed, and interpreted in the present. While working in Egypt, excavating sites whose age is measured in millennia rather than decades, I experienced history as a succession of strata, put down layer by layer, with each level demarcating another historical period. There are few places on this planet where one can stand in an excavation trench and experience, with such clarity, this visual banding of time. I remain captivated by the idea of the existence of a past the refused to depart completely, but instead lies buried, quietly insisting, with the help of archaeologists, to interrupt the seeming continuum of our collective present.
Stemming largely from work done in the Cairo Museum, and more recently at the Legion of Honor, I have begun to reconsider museums as sites of collective memory and cultural heritage. As a witness to the excavation beneath the Legion of Honor, up to and including the reinstallation of the museum's collection, I began to question the museum as a neutral space sheltering an objective past. As a culture, we seldom doubt the museum's authority to define and establish criteria for selecting what goes into collections. We entrust the museum with the preservation and exhibition of those objects and artifacts deemed most significant and worthy of our attention. In a similar vein, the methodology of an archaeological excavation sheds light on the curatorial practice of assembling collections. Even while meticulously observing, recording, and interpreting the past, the act of excavating often obliterates the artifacts' original context. A mundane object, thorough the passage of time, is rendered precious, then collected and displaced--only to be re-placed and assigned new significance within a collection. While working at the Legion of Honor I was struck by the apparent contradiction of a museum that both preserves and erases. How does an institution determine what is to be saved and validated and what is to be discarded and forgotten? Whose past is worthy of collection and preservation and whose is expendable, and why?
Here, the museum functions as a mausoleum, housing not only the objects of the dead but the dead them-selves. And although my work at this site initially began as architectural documentation, with the ensuing exhumations it quickly included more. Mid-excavation photographs of the museum reveal above, a symmetrical facade, and below, a cavernous underworld, conjuring up images of the human psyche--the ordered, conscious ideal looking over the hidden, dark, unconscious realm below. Presiding over the excavation and construction rubble, the museum's classical facade assumes the mantle of rational order, harkening back to the Greek ideal of architecture as a civilizing force. By emulating the layout and design of ritual spaces--temples and cathedrals--museum architecture often takes on the solemnity of a place of worship. The museum goers partake of a predetermined narrative, performing a ritual of witnessing, observing, and paying homage to a history that has been carefully curated and ordered for them.
The Palace of the Legion of Honor is a site steeped in memory, and the excavation of the ground beneath is rich in it implications. Here the preserved heritage is an imported European art history that displaces an ambiguous, disregarded social history. If the museum can be understood as a ceremonial monument dedicated to the preservation of culture, any narrative presented here as history is open to interpretation, including my own. In the act of recording and presenting this information I utilize many of the same practices and methods in question. In the process, I am examining not only the roles of the museum and the archaeologist, but finally my own role as the photographer.
To my mind, these fragments of individual lives, whether included in a a sanctioned museum collection or not, are one more layer of thought and memory quietly insisting its way inot our time present.
Richard Barnes
