In a snow-covered park in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, an enclosed cemetery in the park’s center evokes a much different neighborhood from the one now jammed with auto-glass shops and wholesale produce markets. Headstones engraved with “Hunt” and “Leggett” hark back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when prominent New York families had mansions in the still-rural Bronx.

But a group of students and teachers from nearby Public School 48 may have discovered another piece of New York City history at Joseph Rodman Drake Park, one long forgotten: an African slave burial ground. Poring over census data, maps, photographs and wills, the students identified an area outside the handsome wrought-iron fence surrounding the cemetery as the likely site of the final resting place for scores of slaves.

Last September, a team of scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture used ground-penetrating radar at the site and found “anthropogenic features,” suggestive of skeletal remains, about six feet beneath the parkland. On Friday, students and staff from P.S. 48 — which is also named for Joseph Rodman Drake, a poet who lived from 1795 to 1820 — were joined at a news conference by state elected officials and community leaders to call on the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to officially recognize the burial ground.