Magnetometer Study of Historic Wyatt Chapel
On March 31, 2024, archaeologists Dr. Chet Walker and Aundrea Thompson returned to the campus of Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) to complete their geophysical examinations of the historic burial ground of Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery.
This project is funded through the Summerlee Foundation.
Broken Trees in the Cemetery
The Bottom of the Tree
Storm Damage
The archaeologists
In the spring of 2006, Dr. Walker founded Archaeo-Geophysical Associates, LLC, an archaeological consulting firm specializing in geophysical prospection. Since that time, he has collected geophysical data on over 150 archaeological sites, now totaling much more than 1,539 Acres of Gradiometer, 115 Acres of Ground-Penetrating Radar, and 484 Acres of Electromagnetic Induction Meter.
Aundrea Thompson studied at the University of Wyoming, and she has worked as a forensic archaeologist on numerous projects in the past ten years. For more on one project, in which she located the remains of a World War II soldier and brought his remains back to the US for burial, please click HERE
Hauling their geophysical prospection equipment in a large pick-up truck around the country, Aundrea and Chet spent almost a week on campus conducting the cemetery surveys.
Not only did they push the ground-penetrating radar over the entire five acre field to determine the size of the burial ground, but they also used a drone to scan a 120 square mile area with LIDAR. Moreover, they pulled a magnetometer across the five-acre field to compile additional data.
Descendant Communities
Bishop Walter Pendleton
The cemetery
The burial ground is associated with and named after an African American church founded in the 1890s by Reverend George W. Wyatt, a one-time school teacher and politician who represented Waller and Fort Bend Counties in the state legislature in the 1880s. Based on slave schedules, Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery might contain hundreds of graves of enslaved people, formerly enslaved people, and their descendants. It sits on the former slave labor plantation of Jared E. Kirby, who, in 1860, owned more enslaved people (159) than any other planter in Austin County. No one made a formal record of these burials, however, and the historic burial ground, which is located behind University Village Phase III, was over time abandoned, especially after 1961, with the establishment of nearby Prairie View Memorial Gardens. Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery contains only a handful of marked graves, but it holds forever close the remains of three United States military veterans.
Magnetic Gradiometer
Chet and Aundrea completed the data collection with the magnetometer. Now that all the data is collected, they will analyze the data from the GPR, LIDAR, and magnetometer and submit their findings to Dr. Nesta Anderson, of Legacy Cultural Resources, Inc., who will meet with Dr. Moore and Pamela Morgan, of the Wyatt Chapel Descendants Committee, to compare the results to the findings from the pedestrian survey.
Digital PV Panther Project
John B. Coleman Library
Room 111
Prairie View, Texas 77446
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 936-261-3512
