You’ll never look at a simple stretch of Santa Fe sidewalk again without wondering what’s underneath it.

Join archaeologist Alysia Abbott, PH.D., as she unearths Santa Fe’s forgotten cemeteries, which are far more numerous than you might imagine.

Abbott, who leads the Lost But Not Forgotten Cemetery Tour in conjunction with the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, says the city is crammed with burial grounds that have been lost or just simply no longer acknowledged.

And that only includes the post-columbian ones that we know about. “People tend to bury people where they live, and that’s really what’s happened over the centuries in Santa Fe,” Abbott says. “Cemeteries aren’t going concerns, particularly old ones that have deteriorated. Frequently what happens — and what’s happened over the years in Santa Fe — is they’ve been purchased by people who aren’t interested in maintaining a cemetery. They get rid of the headstones, bulldoze it, and bring some fill in and put in a parking lot. Before you know it, no one remembers that it was a cemetery.”

Abbott, who holds degrees in archaeology and anthropology from the University of Texas and the University of New Mexico, says her information comes from public sources such as maps and deeds or archival photographs.

The tour begins at Cross of the Martyrs, which Abbott describes as an ideal vantage point to overlook and discuss the history of burials in Santa Fe.

From there, Abbott leads the group downslope to the intersection of Kearney Avenue and Magdalena Road, the site of one of Santa Fe’s oldest Catholic cemeteries. Next, the group heads to Montezuma Lodge, where a parking lot rests atop a 19th-century Old Masons and Oddfellows cemetery that houses hundreds of graves. Abbott says that a recent senior living community built near the Lodge, La Secoya, encountered more than 100 burial features during the course of its construction.

“It’s much more common than people can wrap their brains around,” she says. “People are still buried beneath streets and the houses. We hit them when we dig sewer lines and when we trench for building foundations all the time.”

Lost But Not Forgotten Cemetery Tour 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday, June 1

$50 to $60; prior registration required 505-983-2567; historicsantafe.org