VCU news

By Madeline Reinsel

Brooklyn Griffin leans over a broken gravestone in a wooded area of Woodland Cemetery, near Richmond’s Highland Park neighborhood. She slowly circles an iPad over the crumbling pieces of stone, eventually generating a 3D image of the grave marker on the tablet’s screen.

“This is one that I’m pretty sure was run over with equipment when they put this power line up,” the Virginia Commonwealth University undergraduate says, gesturing to a nearby electrical pole. “I ended up trying to collect pieces of it from around the area and scanning it to the best of my ability. But it looks like they found more pieces, so I’m scanning it again.”

Griffin is a member of VCU anthropology professor Bernard Means’ Virtual Curation Lab, where he and his students specialize in taking 3D scans of notable objects. Griffin, Means and other members of the lab have spent two years 3D-scanning grave markers in Woodland Cemetery, which is the final resting place for approximately 30,000 Black residents from the Richmond area.

While a portion of the site looks much like a typical cemetery — winding roads encircling a mowed field of grave markers — a large area of Woodland has been overtaken by forest. Established in 1917, the cemetery, now closed to new burials, is most notably the final resting place of tennis legend and humanitarian Arthur Ashe. And though a statue of Ashe adorns Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the cemetery where he is buried has passed through decades of neglect.

A collection of Richmond-area nonprofits and academic affiliates has spent a decade working to change that. The Virtual Curation Lab is a member of the Richmond Cemetery Collaboratory, whose partner groups and volunteers have been restoring Woodland and other Black cemeteries in the area since the mid-2010s.

While parts of Woodland were maintained in the years before the Woodland Restoration Foundation purchased the site in 2020, only some individual graves were regularly cared for. Means described how Woodland and other nearby Black cemeteries were neglected by their owners for decades, or actively vandalized through the destruction of gravestones or illegal dumping.

“With a lot of these Black cemeteries, you have all of these issues with environmental racism,” Means said. “Where dumps are put there, or trains are put through — think about the interstate highway system cutting neighborhoods in half.”

The scans that Griffin takes rely on a remote sensing technology called LiDAR, which uses a laser to send out tiny beams of light. When those light beams hit an object, they reflect back to the iPad and generate a 3D model of it, much like how bats use sound to find objects through echolocation. The technology may sound advanced, Means said, but it’s included on most newer smartphones and iPads.

“Part of our mission is to use accessible technology,” he said. “And if you get somebody that’s a little techie, they get excited and are like ‘Oh, I can do this.’”

Griffin originally volunteered to help restore East End Cemetery in early 2020, but she wasn’t able to continue during the COVID-19 pandemic. After transferring to VCU for the spring 2024 semester, she met Means during an archeology field school that he teaches at Historic Germanna, a Colonial-era German settlement near Culpeper. In a full-circle moment, he asked her if she’d like to help him scan grave markers in East End and Woodland cemeteries.

“I’ve had a blast learning all kinds of things,” Griffin said. “I knew nothing about 3D scanning or most technology outside of Microsoft Word before working in the lab. But I’ve learned a variety of 3D scanning techniques and how to use the 3D printers.”

She has been focusing on this wooded area of Woodland because it has seen the most damage and is most vulnerable to further degradation. Many of the area’s graves feature only small aluminum markers, placed by funeral homes to designate the spot of a future gravestone. But for families unable to afford a stone, the easily displaced aluminum markers are now the only evidence of a grave.

While walking through Woodland, Griffin pointed out aluminum markers that have been moved from their gravesites or that are missing information. One broken marker displayed only the name of a funeral home.

“Because these aren’t meant to be permanent, it’s really important to scan these whenever we find them, because we don’t know if, next year, they’re going to be destroyed or corroded,” she said.

Besides creating a digital 3D representation of the grave markers, the scans also include each site’s coordinates, making them easier to find later. Griffin and other lab members have been uploading scans of the grave markers to both the Richmond Cemetery Collaboratory’s archives and Find a Grave, an online archive of markers from around the world. Lab members have also 3D-printed some of the grave markers, either to give to relatives of the deceased or to display when presenting their work.

“We’re a first step in a lot of steps,” Griffin said. “The scans are used in the archives or for descendant communities to be able to really connect with their ancestry, even if they’re not local, because a lot of Black communities have been displaced over history.”

Interactions with family members of those buried in Woodland have been the most meaningful part of the project to Griffin. Once, while scanning a marker, she was approached by a man who was curious about her work. Then, he showed her his grandmother’s grave.

“He took me over to his grandmother’s grave and said, ‘I’ve been coming here for 10 years to clean up this grave. But through the restoration efforts that have been happening, I don’t have to do that anymore. And I can look at her and have my family just exist in the cemetery and rest in peace and dignity,’” Griffin said. “And that has definitely stuck with me.”

She and other members of the Virtual Curation Lab also volunteer during restoration days at the cemeteries, and Griffin recently presented at the Richmond Cemetery Collaboratory’s first symposium at the Library of Virginia. This summer, she plans to continue to scan grave markers in both Woodland and East End cemeteries with funding from VCU’s Baldacci Student Experiential Learning Endowed Fund, and to work on completing her honors thesis before her expected December 2025 graduation.

“The thing that attracts me about archeology is the potential to study the under- and un-documented. Everyone leaves things behind, and there’s so much to study,” Griffin said. “There are so many stories that have not been told.”