OKLAHOMA CITY — After revealing Tuesday that they found a probable victim of the Tulsa Race Massacre buried in an unmarked grave, archaeologists said they plan to return to a Tulsa cemetery to continue their search for more male victims.

Phoebe Stubblefield, forensic anthropologist, said they’re planning to return to Oaklawn Cemetery to conduct a systematic enlargement of the excavation in an area known as “Colored Potter’s Field.” The latest effort will focus on exhuming simple coffins with the remains of Black men inside. They’ll also conduct geoarchaeological surveys of the Newblock Park and Canes areas of Tulsa.

Stubblefield said they found one man in his early 20s buried in a plain coffin who suffered at least three gunshot wounds that contributed to his death.

“There is a strong likelihood that when we return, we will recover others like him that we have in our documentation, our documented history,” Stubblefield said. She said they expect to find at least 14, possibly more victims when they return.

Tulsa officials also announced that they’ve hired a DNA company based out of Salt Lake City to try to identify the remains of the eight adult males, six adult females and five children who were excavated and then reinterred as part of their investigation. That analysis is expected to be completed in the next three to five months.

But members of the 1921 Race Mass Grave Investigation Committee criticized the expanded search parameters, saying it’s not enough to only search for male victims of what is believed to be the deadliest race massacre in American history.

There’s only one shot to get it right, said Chief Egunwale Amusan, president of the African Ancestral Society.

For more than two decades now, teams with the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey have been trying to piece together what happened to Black victims of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood District.

In October, crews first located the graves of at least 12 individuals inside the mass burial site, but it wasn’t until June 1 — exactly 100 years since the two-day massacre — that they returned to the site to exhume the bodies and search for additional remains.

Officially, 38 deaths have been confirmed after a white mob murdered, looted and burned the Greenwood District over about 16 hours starting on May 31, 1921, but historians now estimate between 100 and 300 people may have been killed, with many of the Black victims quickly buried in unmarked mass graves without a coroner’s report or a death certificate.

“We are investigating as homicides, but it is not a homicide investigation in the legal sense in which we will be able to contribute to charges,” Stubblefield said. “There will be no charges derived from these investigations that are about one person killing another person. We don’t have the actors. We don’t have the weapons, and right now actually, we don’t have the decedents, but we will have the decedents, of that I am confident.”

Stubblefield said that they’ll only look closely at the plain casket containing males so that they can focus their energies and time on the spirit of the investigation, which is to return the Tulsa Race Massacre victims to history and hopefully to their families.

Amusan, though, said officials are relying on historical information of those who potentially participated in the massacre to determine the search parameters, “which I find absurd.”

He also questioned why, if they’re investigating a homicide, they wouldn’t also search for women and children who might have been victims of the massacre.

Kristi Williams, a member of the oversight committee, said archaeologists should expand their search parameters to include unmarked coffins as well.

“We have to understand it was a massacre,” Williams said. “No one would have been buried with any dignity, right? We can’t leave any stone unturned.”

Stubblefield said moving forward like that requires disturbing graves of people who aren’t the target, and with limited resources, they run the risk of not recovering the individuals who need to be recovered. Many of the people buried in the Black potter’s field were clearly memorialized and loved, including children. Many died before and after 1921, she said.

City of Tulsa officials said that they have budgeted about $800,600 to pay for the effort; as of Tuesday, they had spent over $585,000 of that. A little more than $215,000 remained.

Stubblefield urged the committee to continue supporting their excavation work even if they don’t agree with the specific focus moving forward.

“We’ve been doing this for two or three years now, and you’re still angry, and I get it,” Stubblefield said. “I get that there are things you want that even finding these dead people, you won’t get it from us finding them. But we need to follow up with these decedents because they’ve got families. They were thrown out.”