Creative toolkit of the 1921 Tulsa Graves Investigation field laboratory

The City of Tulsa initiated The 1921 Graves Investigation in 2020 in order to recover and identify African American victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre from unmarked graves. The Tulsa Race Massacre occurred in downtown Tulsa over May 31, 1921, to June 1, 1921, as an act of mob violence, homicide, looting, and arson by white Tulsans against the African American residents of the neighboring Greenwood community. Thirty-nine deaths from both races were documented, and one of the known African American burial sites was in the city cemetery, Oaklawn. Oklahoma statutes regarding disinterment resulted in a recovery plan in which the forensic anthropology lab was established on the cemetery grounds, and lab procedures were adapted for managing fair to poor skeletal preservation, all while accommodating community support and working under media scrutiny. Collaboration between City personnel and the anthropological experts included application of traditional and novel resources to create and operationalize the field laboratory, including adapting a portable building into a functional lab, finding lightweight and opaque remains transport containers, using commonly acquired supplies for new purposes, and modifying analytical techniques for field radiography not previously observed in the literature. These customizations have resulted in the successful implementation of the field laboratory, and the analysis of skeletal remains over five episodes of recoveries and analyses of decedents, as well as a complete deconstruction of the lab at the end of each field season. We present this field laboratory and toolkit assemblage as a resource to the literature of anthropological field analysis.