British parking lot coughs up another one: how often does this happen?

[Pleonast]

@Exapno_Mapcase

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.

@DSeid

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!

In Ohio, it’s not uncommon to find Native American artifacts and bones when digging down. Indians lived in a lot of the same places settlers moved to. Typically, interesting artifacts (mostly arrowheads) are pocketed and other remains go into the fill. It’s rather sad, especially since the more obvious sites were looted and plowed over in the 1800s.

[Colophon]

People in Edinburgh are lucky. My local car park doesn’t allow over-knight parking.

[Meurglys]

@a35362

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.

The Huffpo article linked a few posts above says the skeleton was ‘pretty tall for the time being around 6ft or so’. If the archaeologist in the pictures is who I think he is, I’ve met him and he’s probably around the same height, maybe an inch or so shorter.

And the carpark wasn’t a public carpark; it probably used a ‘permit holders only’ system, with occasional checks for illegally parked vehicles. Unless you worked/studied there, you probably didn’t even know there was extra parking around the corner!

[casdave]

I find it fascinating that he chose to be buried under a car park, I mean, cars hadn’t even been invented, how did he know?

[SanVito]

@Colophon

People in Edinburgh are lucky. My local car park doesn’t allow over-knight parking.

Okay, you win.

[madsircool]

@Steophan

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!

People lived in caves because it was the only place people could be safe from the Chavs and NFFC supporters,