An Oaklawn Cemetery grave thought to hold a crate of some kind turned out to contain two coffins — a normal adult-sized one and a child’s, officials reported Thursday.
The size of the grave shaft had caused the archeologists searching for unmarked burials from Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre to think they had found an oversized crate, which could have been significant because of an oral history that some victims may have been buried in such containers.
The current excavation, which began almost two weeks ago, has uncovered about 50 graves, state archeologist Kary Stackelbeck said in a Facebook video posted Thursday afternoon. From those, a fourth set of remains were exhumed on Thursday.
While the work is providing a great deal of information about Oaklawn’s former potter’s field, it does not seem to have found signs of the mass burials some believe likely occurred following the massacre.
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Many of the graves uncovered during the current phase of the project are unmarked, Stackelbeck said, and records for the section are scant.
The exhumed remains seem to have attracted the researchers’ attention because they were buried in the plainest and least expensive of coffins.
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