Hundreds of bones were pulled out of an Old City construction site. Now what?

[Disir]

It started with a few bones unearthed at an Old City construction site.

....Moran and her team have three theories as to why so many bodies were left behind: the oversight was accidental; descendants may not have paid for some bodies to be moved; or an epidemic may have led to a mass grave that later workers didn’t feel comfortable touching.

So how many people are there? What happened to them? Who, exactly, was buried for so long without anyone knowing they were there?

Hundreds of bones were pulled out of an Old City construction site. Now what?



1793 Yellow Fever.

Open Collections Program: Contagion, The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793

I want that job! I just want to be paid for it.

 

[debbiedowner]

Forensics, check for Jimmy Hoffa.

 

[Picaro]

Probably epidemics or just starved people. Waves of immigrants who couldn't be absorbed into the economy and had no means were in pretty dire straits even in 'good times' historically. They could have just been pauper burial sites, no relatives around to claim their bodies would be the case with many immigrants, often just pits, as they were in Europe. My guess is an epidemic, though, which affected the poor much more than other classes, as always, so pretty much the same thing.

Many of the Irish and German laborers who built the Mississippi River levees system were just left on the ground where they dropped dead, just covered over by the construction; there are 10's of thousands of skeletons buried in those levees.

 

[whitehall]

The way the bones are arranged is obviously indicative of a rational and caring burial so the only conclusion is that it was either a Church burial ground or a cemetery. Is there a problem with that scenario?

 

[Picaro]

Many times epidemic victims were buried in cemeteries. Many of the parks in NYC are former cemeteries and mass graves, at least in the lower parts of Manhattan; it's probably the same in all of the old cities here in the U.S.