I’ll piss on your grave!
Why wait?
It’s because London is an urban, violent 'hood
Does anyone else think that knight (or whatever he was) was a tiny little guy? It’s hard to tell, but that workman looks like he might be a head taller than the skeleton.
This reminds me of the wooden ship they found in Manhattan and the slave burial ground they found in Boston. Surprise!
This article identifies as a Calvary cross.
Bingo. Thanks.
He must be the shortest knight of the year.
cough gasp snort A-hem! 
A plague pit has just been discovered during rail works in London. This looks like a really good find.
Anywhere that’s been inhabited for millennia, like many of the cities in the UK, is going to have vast amounts of stuff underground. Where I live, Nottingham, there’s a vast network of caves, many of them manmade, under much of the city. New sections are being found from time to time. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that people stopped living in them!
It really is. Look up deserted medieval village some time. There are all sorts of places where you can find archeological evidence of occupation from, say, 10th century until it was finally abandoned in the 19th century. It isn’t just Great Britain. You dig up a hole anywhere in Europe and you never know what you might find. Anything from a 7th century grave site to an unexploded WWII era bomb.
You made me groan out loud at my kitchen table.
Also, I don’t think the two finds are really equivalent. IIRC, they specifically went digging for Richard, since they knew from records the approximate location of his tomb.
I know they are calling it a plague pit but what you see in the photo is clearly individual burials. My understanding of a plague pit is it would be a mass grave. Still there is probably more to the story than they are telling us so far.
Now they are saying they think it’s a grave from the start of the plague, before they starting just chucking bodies in pits.
Yeah I notice they have expanded on the story a little now since the original report I read. I really should have read the whole story on the current link.
Oh, good, they dug up patient zero.
How much would we find in various American urban excavations if we looked? (Note: from what I understand what most construction crews actually do here is intentionally look the other way … something found and reported is going to slow the project down … better no one knows they found something that could be “interesting.”)
I would have thought if they found human remains they would have to stop. I know in the UK the moment they find human remains they have to involve the Police until it is established that the remains are over a certain age and so archaeological in nature.
Of course they could still look the other way but I would have thought that unlikely in particular to human remains.
You don’t have to report what you don’t “find” and there is incentive to not look.
This article is of course notable for the fact that once human remains were identified work on the project was stopped, but also notable was that “more remains were found when an archaeologist screened backfill from the same trench.”
A development team finds a few bones, they don’t know for *sure *what kind, cow, deer, human … bring it to someone’s attention? If it is human your project is stopped, your job is halted, your pay perhaps as a worker and your timeline and potential profit or loss impacted as a developer. Nothing to see here buddy. Cart the debris away!
The writeup at Huffington Post,
has a good picture of the tombstone with its “cross fleury” and sword, and this bit in the comments that is too good not to share (thanks Frogbert):
Now is the winter of our disinterment, made glorious summer by these sons of Indiana! Now are our brows bound up with bright orange hard hats, our bruised knees hung up for monuments. Our stern car alarums changed to merry Tweetings!, our dreadful March winds to delightful tape-measurements. Grim visaged parking attendants hath smoothed their wrinkled tickets and now instead of mounting higher fees to tightly cram more cars into the lot, they caper, nimbly in a crampéd ticket booth while archaeologists scramble over loot.