A 13th century knight has been unearthed in Scotland while digging for a parking lot (other people, not the knight).
Are Scotland and England really like Israel, where you can’t take a leak outside without unearthing something or other?
First a King, now this.
Short answer: yes. What bugs me though is what was the lot used for between the 13th century and when the car park was built on it (post war?) Building a parking lot on ‘virgin’ land is a strange development.
Seems like the Dissolution of the Monasteries led to a lot of aristocratic tombs being destroyed and lost. IIRC, that was the case with Richard to.
It was a cark-park they were tearing up. They’re building a University building on the site now.
Yep, but shaking off my laziness and reading further: “It was already known the area had been the site of the 18th Century Old High School, the 16th Century Royal High School and the 13th Century Blackfriars Monastery.”
So it’s likely that the car park was the first disturbance on the spot since the burial.
The redevelopment of the car park may have been the first development that required any signficant digging, since the carpark was presumably open space, and it may well have been open space even before they surfaced it to park cars on it.
Pretty sure it was Richard three,
Ha! thank you, here all week etc.
Does anyone have an exemplar of the type of marking on the coffin? Or seen any closeups of this one?
Something in the inscription about the valley of the crescent moon, and only the penitent man shall pass.
If Time Team has taught me anything, and indeed it has taught me a lot, it’s that the UK is completely overflowing with ancient artefacts and dead royal dudes, and they’re all six inches at most beneath the surface of well-travelled areas.
In built up areas with long heritage, pretty much.
Apparently it drives developers mad in London. The City is always being redeveloped, so they are always digging something up they didn’t want to. Because when they do, they have to halt the works and bring in the archaeologists to check things out before they carry on. Sometimes they have to provide some kind of access to the remains of ancient buildings that appear under the foundations of new skyscrapers.
Imagine what it’s like in Rome!
A lot of Europe is sort of like that: you dig, you find stuff. When my old drama school in Utrecht was being renovated they found the old city wall. This was the wall that was the border of Rome, beyond which there were dragons (and fierce Frisians, presumably).
Actually, that is far less of an issue within the City of London than in most historic city centres. Property within the City was already so valuable by the nineteenth century that most commercial buildings were built with very deep basements. So on most sites any layers with archaeological remains have long since been destroyed. The archaeological record for the City proper is surprisingly sparse. Of course, it’s the cases when they do find remains that attract attention.
It’s in the middle of an ancient town and it’s easy to find old stuff everywhere! Some of the remnants of the Flodden Wall are very close to the site (they form some of the boundary of the university buildiings and grounds they’re excavating within) and they date back to just after 1513.
It’s not a big car-park; this is an aerial view. They’re squeezing in an extra building; here’s their site’s latest photos of the discoveries. There’s also a link at the bottom to a history of the site.
Thanks for the new photos. That ornate quadra-thingie seems to be affixed to a base of some sort.
Any idea what it is? I smell a research project, but it’s an entirely new field for me.
With everything being an ancient ancestral burial ground, I’m surprised you don’t have a lot more poltergeist problems there.
the lot was going to be for knight parking.
Edinburgh is, supposedly, a very haunted city - evening ghost tours are very popular. And, coincidentally I’m sure, the city morgue is only 50 yards away from the site.
(On the google view I posted, scroll right a little and the morgue is the separate modern building that appears at the bottom right!)
This is true for most of the United States, too, especially in the northeast where people have been living, building, and dying for centuries. Same for the areas of the southwest with hundreds of years on concentrated inhabitation.
I have a friend who teaches archaeology locally. She bought a random, undistinguished old house out in the country, but on a main road from hither to yon. She now brings her students in to do formal digs in her backyard and they find all sorts of old farming and farmhouse artifacts.
Any place in the world that has a continual presence of human beings has layers of stuff under the ground. You’re more guaranteed to find artifacts in any random spot than you are to find water. And we all know how easy it is to find water. 
I dunno… I’ve never had an honest to goodness artifact fall out of the sky and hit me in the face…